One jam sammich and he’s anybody’s
A nature-lover has been coined the ‘The Badgerman’ after a badger sett accepted him into their community.
Huh. Secretive my ass. One jam sammich and he’s anybody’s. What made this article worth reading was this:
His most moving moment in 30 years of studying the badgers was seeing a sow bury one of her young cubs.
Gareth said: ‘It was a sight I will never forget. The baby badger had broken its leg and managed to get back to the set. A few days later other members of the badger family began digging a hole a short distance away. Then I watched the mother badger come out of the set with her dead baby in her jaws. She carried it to the hole and then the others covered it with soil.’
‘The badgers never went near that area again – it was like consecrated ground to them.’
Now, I’m not absolutely 100% sure I believe this story, but there’s no question animals sometimes have a meaningful concept of death. And not just, “ZOMG! That thing that used to be Bob smells like Friskies — let’s eat it!”
I’ve read that a cat will stop looking for a dead companion if you show him the body. And I’m sure I’ve posted this story before — one of the eeriest things I’ve ever seen was a cat, early one morning, standing in the driving rain with water drizzling off her whiskers, staring into the grass of my neighbor’s lawn. She backed off, very slowly, when I came toward her (she’s the neighborhood cat I’m sure was Charlotte’s mom and she never let me near her). She’d been standing over the dead body of a great big dead ginger tomcat. Probably hit by a car, but there was not a mark on him (including bite marks — I did wonder).
Well, it’s all very strange. Let’s drink!
July 22, 2009 — 7:02 pm
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