Hi Hettie
It may be Hedgehog Awareness Week, but it is not Anti Badger Week!
Badgers and Hedgehogs have shared the planet for a very long time. Badgers are not the only natural enemy of Hedgehogs. Foxes will also eat them. And their main enemy is probably, in fact, humans.
BHPS and PTES have made a joint statement under:
https://ptes.org/campaigns/hedgehogs/hedgehogsandbadgers/
The following are some quotes from that statement:
‘None of the scientific evidence supports the idea that culling badgers is an effective means of controlling bovine TB in the field.’
‘An analysis of the original badger culling experiments, published in April 2014, shows that, at some sites, hedgehog numbers did increase following reduction in the number of badgers. This is not unexpected, considering what we know of the relationship between hedgehogs and badgers. BHPS and PTES do not consider this sufficient evidence to advocate culling badgers as a means of increasing hedgehog numbers, and believe that culling any species in an effort to conserve another is undesirable given better environmental approaches.’
‘Hedgehogs face many other challenges and it would be wrong to focus on this issue and distract from others.’
