Memo to badgers: You really need to hire a publicist.

Case in point: an ad for a car that claims to have superduper soundproofing. A dude is locked in the car with a nursing badger mom and her tykes. The badgers are described as “ferocious.” And they’re all asleep. Awww. The car windows are rolled up. An announcer says: “If awakened, the badger will gnaw [the human’s] face off.” A cannon is fired repeatedly. The soundproofing appears to work. Then dude-in-the-car’s cell phone goes off. Mother Badger snarls and lunges.

Not a good moment for the badger image.

It turns out badgers have a history of bad P.R. That’s what I learned from Roger Packham, a senior ecosystems biologist at the British Columbia Ministry of Environment. He’s been studying them since 2003 because of their endangered status in B.C.

Back in the 1940s and ‘50s, British Columbians were trapping 300 to 400 badgers a year. Today, says Packham, “we feel we have fewer than 400 left in B.C.”

“Persecution” was probably the main reason for their decline, Packham says. In other words, people kill them. “There’s a big myth that livestock fall into badger burrows and break their legs. So the only good badger, as far as a lot of farmers are concerned, is a dead badger.” Hence the trapping. Badgers were also pursued for their fur pelts. And nowadays, they often end up as roadkill.

As for the accuracy of the ad, Packham makes two Very Important Points:

1) “I don’t think you want to mess with any nursing mother, badger or human or anything else.”

2) “Let’s just face it: Badgers nursing their babies are not going to end up in a car in the first place.”

But what if a human came into close contact with a badger. Would it gnaw off the human’s face?

Packham says he’s had his nose fewer than 10 inches from a badger’s nose and never been threatened. (Ground squirrels and marmots, staples of the badger diet, would likely say otherwise.)

What’s more, Packham once worked with a vet who was implanting radios in badger body cavities to track the animals in the wild. And the vet made a comment about how easy the badgers were to handle. “His comment was, ‘If this was a house cat, we’d all be bleeding by now.’ ”

Meowr.

You can check our Packham’s badger work at www.badgers.bc.ca.  

-Marc Silver

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