On Hunting Badgers

I don’t know how they hunt badgers in your neck of the woods or whether they do at all, but where I come from badger hunting was big. There are basically three ways to bag a badger. One, you can use dynamite, two, you can dig them out and three, you can use dogs to dislodge them from their den. Badgers, like foxes, were considered a nuisance, because they raided people’s chicken coops. They were hunted indiscriminately, partly because there was a price on their head. If I remember right, I believe it was 10 marks in those days, roughly 2 dollars. And partly, because their pelt made a very attractive throw rug with its white V-shaped stripe down the sides.

I believe my father mostly hunted badgers, because my grandmother and my mother, for that matter, swore by the alleged curative properties of badger fat, which they applied liberally in poultices to boils, open sores or to your chest to draw out the fever, if you were laid low with the flu. My mother also used badger fat as shortening in her cakes and pies.

Badger dens can have as many as ten or fifteen exits and the dens can be more than six feet deep. If you use dynamite to dislodge a badger from its den, it’s best to proceed with some caution. The idea is to get the stick of dynamite as close to the center of the den as possible, before setting it off. There are two ways of doing this. One is to make sure you have a long fuse and to push the stick as deep as possible down one of the badgers’ tunnels before lighting it, the other is to dig down from the top in the center of the den as far as you can go and then set off the charge. And then you’ve got to dig to get down to the center of the den and retrieve the bits and pieces that are left. This is a labor-intensive way of getting at the badgers, unless the badger had the good sense to dig his den in sandy soil. Obviously, you only use dynamite if dogs are unavailable for one reason or another. Otherwise, this method does not make much sense, because dynamite tends to scatter stuff everywhere and you have to hit the deck to avoid the flying debris.

The most efficient and the preferred way to hunt badgers is with dogs. To hunt badgers with dogs you need dachshunds. They are unbelievable. I’m not talking about the cute pets you see waddling around today. My father loved to hunt badgers and foxes. And he used dachshunds, which were bred for this task. They were usually rough hairs, named “Purzl” or “Waldi” and they never seemed to last very long. They were ferocious. I’ve seen them drag a badger nearly twice their size out if its lair. Once they had their teeth into something, they would never let go or at least not until my father told them to let go. They only listened to him. They also were pretty sneaky. In our house, if a visitor entered, they’d greet him or her – they did not discriminate - with wagging tails, but the minute you turned your back to them, they’d have you by the ankles and only my father could get them to let go. You can see how this created problems for us at times. People didn’t want to visit, if they knew my father was away without his dogs.

A badger, “Dachs” in German, is much larger than a dachshund. Badgers are also pretty wily and they are fierce when cornered or attacked. Their lairs are deep, some six to ten feet with many exits. The way you hunted them with dogs was you blocked all but two of the exit tunnels with fire, usually burning grass and leaves, so that the smoke drifted down into the passage. The dogs – you needed at least two - would go down one smoke-free shaft and my father would post himself near the remaining unblocked burrow entrance with his shotgun. The dogs worked as a team. One would attack from the front, the other would try to sneak around the back. Between them, they always got the upper hand. My job was to lie face down over the center of the den, listen to the sounds of the combatants below and point out the direction of the progression of the battle. Normally the badger would try to escape through the unblocked smoke-free exit, chased by the dogs. You had to be careful not to shoot the dogs. You also had to hope that you’d found and plugged all the badger den’s exits. If you missed one, you were out of luck. Badgers move surprisingly swift for an animal that looks so deceivingly placid.

My father was very good at badger hunting. He never missed his shot, never hit any of his dogs or me, for that matter. I felt nervous sometimes lying on top of the center of the den during these hunts, because the badgers didn’t always launch themselves straight out of their lair. Sometimes they turned and came straight at you. This made it obligatory to roll out of the way fast. I wasn’t so much worried about getting shot, but of getting bit by a crazed badger, a very unpleasant and disagreeable thought.

Sometimes the dogs would drag their prey out backwards. If that happened, my father didn’t interfere but let the dogs do their thing. Some of the badger’s tunnels were traps and led nowhere. Sometimes they’d get a dog into one of those fake shafts and with their powerful hind legs try to bury it in there alive. Those passages were hard to locate from above. You listened to the dogs’ barks and tried to dig down to rescue it. If you couldn’t locate it, the dog would suffocate. That happened occasionally.

If jamming a stick of dynamite down a badger hole seems a bit risky to you or if you don’t want to jeopardize your dogs unnecessarily in a badger den, you could, of course, post yourself near a chicken coop and wait for the badger to come. This, however, is an iffy proposition, since you don’t know their schedule and, of course, they are nocturnal in their food-gathering habits and you depend on moonlight for visibility. You could waste hours waiting for them to make an appearance or cloud cover could make the raiders invisible or you could nod off and miss them altogether. The other downside to this method of badger hunting is that you have to discharge your shotgun in close proximity to the chickens as well as houses and out-buildings and there was the distinct possibility of collateral damage.