Natural History

Eurasian badgers are not solitary.

When I reared a [European or Eurasian] badger I never could forbid it to do anything. If I scolded it when it opened a cupboard and pulled out my linen, and if I gave it a smack on the nose it attacked me.  It would not subordinate itself.  A dog, on the other hand, quickly learns to obey.

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate, p. 89.

Before Eibl-Eibesfeldt discusses the badger, he claims that its recalcitrance is the result of its solitary nature. The dog learns to obey because it is a social animal.

He would have been correct if the subject badger had been of the North American species. It really is a solitary species, and it is even more aggressive than its Eurasia counterpart when cornered.

However, the European badger is a social animal. Indeed, it lives in social groups that center around a mated pair– just like we would expect to see in wolves. And just like wolves, generally only this mated pair reproduce.

I don’t know why Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought that these animals are solitary.

But it wouldn’t be the first time this mistake has been made.

Many people believe, with almost theological fervor, that European rabbits are solitary, and thus, the best way to keep domestic rabbits, which are derived from European rabbits, is in separate cages. This is nonsense.

European rabbits are colony breeders. Dominant buck rabbits maintain harems, while subordinate males form monogamous relationships. The bucks actually help care for the young. This behavior is very different from cottontail rabbits, which maintain small territories, and are indeed relatively solitary.

So why did Eibl-Eibesfeldt have such a hard time training his badger?

Well, I’ll answer that by asking another question: Why do people have a hard time training wild animals, even those that are social?

The best example I can think of is the wolf. Wolves are very hard to train.

Now, you’d think that their trainability would be quite high, because we know that domestic dogs are very easy to train. Surely dogs got their trainability from their wild ancestors, right?

Well, this assumption is simply wrong. Wolves are almost impossible to house train, and while they can learn behaviors, they don’t seem to ever develop the almost scary reliability one sees in some of the easily regimented breeds of domestic dog.

We now believe that the domestic dog got its trainability through domestication. Some scientists like Vilmos Csanyi actually argue that dogs have developed an ability to learn rules,  a skill that no other species has been able to match.

Now, I won’t go that far, but I will say that much of the research on domestic dogs shows that they have developed some sort of cognitive shortcuts that allow them to read humans. It’s also possible that we have also developed complementary cognitive short-cuts that also allow us to read them. Whatever it is, domestic dogs have a leg-up (no pun intended) in learning how to fit into human society.

And that’s why Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s badger had a hard time learning the rules. It wasn’t because the badger was solitary. It was because the badger’s brain hasn’t evolved to fit with human society.

This story about the badger is a very good example of an ethologist getting something wrong about the natural behavior of a species and then using those results to generalize even larger errors.

Thus, it’s not the solitary nature that makes the badger hard to handle. It is the fact that it is a wild animal that makes it hard to handle.