Badgers face welfare pressures from culling programmes, baiting, road traffic, and persecution. Understanding their biology and legal protections supports effective advocacy for their welfare.
Badger welfare is compromised by multiple simultaneous pressures. Road traffic causes acute trauma; culling causes death from shooting that is sometimes non-lethal, leaving wounded badgers to die slowly; and illegal baiting causes extreme, deliberate suffering. The welfare cost of culling is compounded by perturbation — disrupting social groups spreads surviving badgers across wider areas, potentially moving infected individuals into new territories. The conservation status of badgers as a protected species creates a framework for enforcement that protects them from intentional persecution but not from government-sanctioned culling. The welfare argument for badger vaccination over culling — effective disease control without killing — is clear and increasingly supported by scientific evidence.