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EURASIAN BADGER: HYSTORICAL FACTS

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The Eurasian badger, in spite of his wide distribution and diffusion, was ignored and not well understood for many years. The great French naturalist George Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), in his Histoire Naturelle, described the badger as a lazy and solitary inhabitant of woods. In an Italian translation of the Histoire Naturelle (1825) the badger is drawn as "sluggish, mistrustful, solitary". According to Buffon the badger was unknown in the whole Asia and to the ancient Greeks, moreover it was not widespread out of Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the British Isles, Poland and Sweden. About the badger biology, it was wrongly thought that the birth period was in summer.

Emilio Cornalia, in 1870, classified the badger in the family Ursidae; he described the animal as lazy, solitary and with a weakness for maize. For other people the badger was a real predator and the taxidermists used to prepare the animal in hunting pose, with little preys in his mouth (see the photo).
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In 1884 C.Vogt and F Specht, translated by prof. Lessona, quoted some tales which describe the badger as "a pacific bourgeois, gentle and meditative, who loves his family, his home and the quiet (…). He his cousin and good friend of the fox, who in vain tries to bring again on the path of virtue, and who defend as a good relative, in spite of the nasty tricks that she play on him". The knowledge of the badger biology were been increasing, but the two zoologists thought that badgers felt in a state of lethargy.

In 1907 Luigi Figuier again described a loath and solitary badger. We had to wait until the forties, with the first studies of Ernest Neal, to understand all the different aspects of the biology of this exceptional species.

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