Badgered

Apparently those pesky badgers have 'moved the goalposts' in order to frustrate the government approved cull.  You really can't make this stuff up, can you?  A government Minister apparently admitting that his government's policies have been defeated by wild animals.  It's such a humiliation that the government is now planning to gas badgers en masse.  After loading them onto trains and transporting them to special camps, no doubt.  Now, there's something the Daily Mail could get behind.  I'm still none the wiser as to exactly how the badgers have moved the goalposts with regard to the cull.  Have they been shooting back?  Or maybe they've been outwitting the blackshirts, sorry, pest controllers, sent after them by deploying fake badgers for them to shoot.  Perhaps they've even set up complete fake setts, full of stuffed toy badgers. 

More years ago than I care to remember I wrote a story for The Sleaze about how the Countryside Alliance was trying to blacken the name of badgers in order to lessen public sympathy for them in the event of a cull.  It was inspired by actual events which, as we've seen, failed completely to undermine public sympathy for badgers.  I can guarantee that if those badgers really were to take the fight to the pest controllers, by going round to their houses and gassing them and their families, for instance, the public would be cheering them on.  Cute furry black and white beasts will always win out over kill crazy hill billies with telescopic sights in the sympathy stakes.  It doesn't matter that badgers are, in reality, bloody vicious little predators, (or drug dealers and pornographers, as I claimed in that story of yesteryear), they will always be more appealing than some thug with a gun.  Or a Tory minister, for that matter.