A woman made the most heartbreaking discovery following the death of yet another wild animal on a busy stretch of road.
Every year, an alarming number of animals are killed by cars. According to calculations published in The Ecology of Transportation: Managing Mobility for the Environment, over 350 million vertebrate animals are killed on U.S. roads every year.
It’s not a problem limited to the U.S. of course. In 2020, a study published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment collated data from as many as 90 different surveys on vehicle-related animal deaths.
The final figures made for bleak reading: each year across the continent, 29 million mammals and 194 million birds were killed on the road.
Tracy Davenport and her family live in the U.K. by a busy stretch of road with a 30 mile an hour speed limit she says “no one pays attention to.” It’s led to an alarming number of incidents in which wild animals attempting to cross the road have been killed.
Seeing the devastating reality behind these road death statistics play out is difficult. “It always breaks my heart seeing them on the side of the road,” Davenport told Newsweek.
That’s partly what prompted her to post a video to TikTok showing her latest discovery. It’s not footage of a dead animal but instead showcases a small glimpse of the fallout from one of these deaths.
As a caption accompanying the clip, posted under the handle messedupbutmanaging, explains, it all started a couple of nights after a badger was run over outside their family home. A couple of days later, when Davenport and her husband started hearing a “noise coming from the woods.”
“It was actually the dogs who made the discovery in a patch of woodland behind a barbed wire fence,” Davenport said. Her husband was walking their dogs nearby at the time. “He dragged the dogs away, came home and told me there was ‘something you need to do,'” she said.
Walking down to the area her partner pointed out, Davenport was able to locate the source of the crying: it was a lone badger cub.
“Its cries were breaking my heart,” she said. “Putting two and two together I knew the badger that was run over in front of my house before had to be the mom. Why else would it have been out of that sett?”
An animal unfamiliar to some Americans, badgers are commonplace in the U.K., though there are concerns for the future of the species. Part of that is down to the number killed on U.K. roads every year. According to leading animal charity the Badger Trust, based on a statistics garnered over the course of a year, more badgers are killed on U.K. roads on average than any other species.
Davenport’s discovery was different though. Left unchecked, this badger cub would almost certainly have died. She was determined for that not to be the case. It wasn’t easy though. “I had brought some raw dog food and tossed a bit over to it but it wasn’t interested in the mince,” she said. “It was just too little and too upset.”
After ringing around, she got in touch with someone from the Badger Trust who helped her put a plan in place. “He said I should go back immediately and catch it in case it went back down in the sett, that would be bad as it could starve down there,” Davenport said. “So I grabbed my son to help and a box with blankets. It was Muddy, dark and I had to get over a barbed wire fence. But I got him thankfully.”
TikTok/messedupbutmanaging
Though the badger cub was a “bit wobbly” and understandably terrified to be taken out of their natural habitat, Davenport and her son soon saw an indication that the small, defenseless animal was appreciative of their efforts and, on some basic level, finally felt safe.
“It did put up a bit of a fight at first but as soon as I lifted it to me it just completely relaxed and stopped crying,” she said. “It literally went to sleep immediately, it was just so exhausted.”
Someone came and collected the cub later that night and was pleased to report that, while a little dehydrated, the young animal was otherwise in good health. The plan from there was to give the cub some milk and take it to a rescue.
Davenport hopes her story might inspire others to drive more carefully and that those reading consider supporting organizations like the Badger Trust, without which an innocent cub like this might well have died.
Right now, she’s just glad to have done her part. “I’m just so pleased the baby was taken in, otherwise I would have kept it,” she said. “It’s not the kind of thing you can ignore.”