Something is stirring deep in the woodlands on the League Against Cruel Sports’ wildlife reserves.

Something is stirring deep in the woodlands on the League Against Cruel Sports’ wildlife reserves.

Fresh earth outside the badger setts is a good indication that preparations are being made to accommodate this years’ cubs. The badger population in the south-west of England has been decimated by the joint impact of legal and illegal killing over the past decade, and every new cub that is born is vital to the survival of the species. It is great that the badgers living on the wildlife reserves are left undisturbed and can get a good start in life.

Badgers exemplify the mixed and sometimes contradictory attitudes that people have towards wild animals. Most people never see a live badger but nonetheless hold them in affection as a result of childhood stories about Mr Badger and friends. Whereas, some farmers hate badgers because they wrongly blame them for spreading TB to cattle, and gamekeepers despise badgers because well, they don’t like anything that isn’t on the shooting list.

When it comes to reintroducing wild animals that have been missing from our countryside for years due to persecution and habitat loss, the temperature of the debate is turned up to maximum. The reintroduction of pine martens onto Exmoor in 2025 caused uproar amongst a certain section of the local community. From the scare stories doing the rounds, you could have been forgiven for thinking these domestic cat-sized generalist feeders are the size of lions and twice as dangerous. Fortunately, good sense prevailed, and I am pleased to say that at least one of the released pine martens has been caught on camera on a League Against Cruel Sports wildlife reserve.

Beavers are another animal that has caused heated debate since they returned to west country rivers a few years ago. We have got so used to rivers and streams being forced to take paths around fields that we have forgotten that floodplains are just that. Rivers are supposed to flood into surrounding fields at times of high river levels and release the water slowly back into the river. That way, flooding of towns and cities downstream is alleviated. Beavers do that work for free, building a series of small dams that slow and filter water as it travels downstream. Beavers are great engineers and a keystone species that benefits many other species (including people) with its industrious building.

If we want nature to recover from its current perilous state we need to accept that all of our native wildlife has the right to thrive and that is exactly the ethos we have on the League’s wildlife reserves.