Badgers and Foxes in Scotland 2061 
There is no wild animal better able to look after itself. He is a rascal. He 
takes lambs in the spring, and game in the summer. He kills more than he can 
eat, hiding what is over against another time, nor troubles to return so long as he 
can get anything fresh to kill and hide again. Every man’s hand is against him. 
But shepherd and keeper alike are at their wits’ end; he is a match for both of 
them. He is hard to outwit with a bait, and when caught he chooses the heroic 
remedy of biting the leg through, leaving the foot, and as much more as need be, in 
the trap. Nothing is left but a chance shot, and that is just what he will not give, 
or not very often. He usually sees before he is seen, and the only view of him is 
as he goes out of reach at his easy gallop. Were any other native wild animal to 
give an equally good reason in its bad conduct, it is not too much to say that it 
must soon cease to exist; yet this ruthless destroyer, well-nigh as bad as the wolf, 
continues to hold the mountain fastnesses and moorlands in practically undiminished 
numbers. The lowland fox thins out rats, voles, and other field pests. But he has 
EUROPEAN FOX. 
no such plea. The one service is that he keeps down the blue hares, which disturb 
the birds by their strange antics, and, where they increase too rapidly, are apt to be 
troublesome to the sportsman. 
Stepping across the lowlands to the southern uplands and the wilds of Eskdale and 
Liddlesdale, we find the badger in possession as in the nevyer-to-be-forgotten times of Guy 
Mannering. There was no difficulty in finding one at Charlie’s Hope to test the metal 
of the two redoubtable ancestors of the breed—since called ‘‘ Dandie Dinmont,” after the 
farmer himself, no less—as on that memorable occasion when, in the draw, “ Pepper” 
lost his fore foot and ‘‘ Mustard” was nearly throttled. The mountain fox, too, is still 
as numerous as when almost every farmer on-the border-land had a pai of large fierce 
ereyhounds—of the race of those deerhounds formerly used in the country—and set aside 
a day to settle accounts with the marauders anent certain lambs that could in 
nowlse be found. 
