Badger digging
South Wales, WA (UK)

Incident Date: Sunday, Jan 16, 2005

Disposition: Convicted

Defendant/Suspect: man

Case Updates: 1 update(s) available

At 7am, a team of seven police and RSPCA officers are crammed into the back room of a tiny rural police station in South Wales. In just over an hour's time, they and two other teams will launch Operation Jubilee: simultaneous raids on three houses in South Wales to search for evidence of badger digging - a "field sport" that's still common throughout the UK even though it's been illegal for more than 30 years.

Note: Badger diggers send specially trained terriers to attack badgers in their underground setts, and then dig through the tunnel roof to expose the fight, ending only when the badger is bludgeoned to death with a spade. Or the badger is forced to fight for its life against terriers or lurchers.

As snow falls outside, Ian Briggs, an investigator with the RSPCA's secretive Special Operations Unit (SOU), starts his briefing. "On 16 January at High Woolaston in Gloucestershire, a group of six men were disturbed by police in the process of digging a badger sett," he says. "A civilian witness observed one of the men with a shotgun and heard shots before police arrived. At the scene, police found a brown terrier running around and a dead badger tied to a tree.

"At 8am, we will execute a search warrant under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to obtain evidence of equipment associated with badger digging - nets, dogs, videos, pictures of that terrier and dead animals. We also want any information linking the people living at the three addresses. If any dogs are there that have recent injuries, the owner can be arrested; if there are no arrestable offences, we'll ask him for a voluntary interview. It should be a straightforward job, but it obviously depends on how he reacts."

The man who lives in the house Briggs is about to raid is the registered owner of a 4x4, which was spotted at the scene of the badger dig. All six badger diggers took off when the police arrived, but when the civilian witness tried to stop two of them getting away, they threatened him with a shotgun. No one was arrested, but the police gathered a substantial amount of forensic evidence from the scene and passed the details to Briggs.

If uniformed inspectors are the RSPCA's bobbies on the beat, the SOU is its Special Branch, tasked with gathering intelligence and tracking down offenders in the battle against what the charity calls "serious, organised and commercial cruelty". Established in 1977, members of the 12-strong team conduct extensive surveillance operations (sometimes covertly following vehicles for thousands of miles), infiltrate criminal gangs, cultivate informants and spend painstaking hours building cases against suspected offenders.

This raid is just the latest in a series of major anti-cruelty operations across the UK that have recently tackled dog fighting, the illegal transportation of racing greyhounds, cock fighting, the illegal wild-bird trade and the importation of extreme animal-cruelty films. "We are police trained in full mobile surveillance, police driving, and both static urban and rural surveillance," says Briggs. "We're also taught how to handle informants, which is probably the most sensitive part of the job, because of the risks involved for both them and us." The RSPCA is now the largest private prosecution agency in the UK, bringing about 1,000 cases a year, and the SOU is often behind prosecutions of the most disturbing.

Shortly before 8am, a convoy of three cars leaves the police station. It's a strangely undramatic scene - the house, less than three minutes' drive away, is small and whitewashed, with a scruffy outbuilding to the right and shed out back. There's a tidy garden with flowerbeds behind a small wall. Briggs knocks on the door. A squat, muscular man with a shaved head answers and lets them in. The rest of the team follows.

Meanwhile, a second SOU officer - who has requested anonymity - videos the search, while uniformed inspectors check the 4x4. The owner, who denies any involvement in badger digging, is asked to open an outhouse. Yet, while searching the 4x4, one of the uniformed RSPCA inspectors unearths a radio collar - commonly used for badger digging - and a number of coarse animal hairs. "Badger hair is very distinctive," Briggs says as he studies it. "It has a ridge which you can feel when you roll it between your fingers. This feels as if it's got a ridge to me, but obviously it'll need to be checked by an expert."

Briggs joined the RSPCA after he left the army and worked as a uniformed inspector for five years, as all members of the unit have to. "I've now been in the SOU for seven years, and I still have no idea what I'm going to be doing from one day to the next," he says. He spent most of last week on a surveillance operation with the police in northern England. The week before, he was part of a team that raided a London pub at the centre of the illegal trade in wild birds. Inside, officers found more than 100 birds, mostly finches, and a substantial amount of bird-catching equipment - 13 men were arrested on suspicion of animal cruelty and other offences under the Wildlife and Countryside Act.

Each member of the unit co-ordinates work on particular areas, and Briggs is responsible, among other things, for badgers. Even though digging for the animals was made illegal by the Badger Act 1973 and their setts were protected in 1991, Briggs estimates that hundreds of people still go badger digging every week. Many of them argue that the badger is over-protected, and believe they are offering farmers and landowners a valuable service by getting rid of badgers for them. They are not alone in those beliefs - only last week, more than 300 vets called for a "strategic cull" of badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB). The vets, mainly from South-west England, the region worst affected by bovine TB, believe that badgers are responsible for passing the disease on to cattle. In a letter to the Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett, they expressed "despair" at the Government's approach, but the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs rejected their calls. The Government is expected to announce new plans for dealing with the disease sometime this week.

But Briggs believes the badger diggers' motivation is more sinister. The attraction, he explains, is killing the badger and seeing how well the dog performs. "It's a big thing if the dog is quiet when working in the sett. The owners will keep a tally of how many badgers or foxes each animal has done." The badger is then shot or killed by the dog. He adds that, because it's such a clandestine activity, it's very difficult to catch the culprits, so the unit increasingly relies on forensic evidence to prove that laws have been broken.

Case Updates

References

• The Independent - March 2, 2005

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