(n.) An itinerant licensed dealer in commodities used for food; a hawker; a huckster; -- formerly applied especially to one who bought grain in one place and sold it in another.
(n.) A carnivorous quadruped of the genus Meles or of an allied genus. It is a burrowing animal, with short, thick legs, and long claws on the fore feet. One species (M. vulgaris), called also brock, inhabits the north of Europe and Asia; another species (Taxidea Americana / Labradorica) inhabits the northern parts of North America. See Teledu.
(n.) A brush made of badgers' hair, used by artists.
(v. t.) To tease or annoy, as a badger when baited; to worry or irritate persistently.
(v. t.) To beat down; to cheapen; to barter; to bargain.
Example Sentences:
(1) In a single letter in February 2005, Charles urged a badger cull to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis – damning opponents to the cull as “intellectually dishonest”; lobbied for his preferred person to be appointed to crack down on the mistreatment of farmers by supermarkets; proposed his own aide to brief Downing Street on the design of new hospitals; and urged Blair to tackle an EU directive limiting the use of herbal alternative medicines in the UK.
(2) MPs have voted to abandon the controversial badger cull in England entirely, inflicting an embarrassing defeat on ministers who had already been forced to postpone the start of the killing until next summer.
(3) Forty-seven badgers were caught from the eight social groups.
(4) The government's decision to allow a cull of badgers, reportedly to combat bovine tuberculosis, "flies in the face of the scientific evidence" and will serve only to spread the disease, Labour claims.
(5) The planned cull had suffered a series of blows recently, including the discovery of up to twice as many badgers in the culling zones than expected, driving up the cost and complexity of the cull.
(6) Field trials found the BCG vaccine reduced the incidence of bovine TB in badgers by 73.8%.
(7) I tried hard not to think of a time hence when I could count every tree in the wood, when the badger sett would be in an open field.
(8) Rosie Woodroffe, a professor and a key member of an earlier landmark 10-year study of badger culling , said: "It would be extraordinarily unusual for natural causes to change badger populations so rapidly, and indeed no such changes have been seen [elsewhere].
(9) There was generally avoidance of pasture treated with badger urine up to 14 days old.
(10) Wild animals, particularly badgers, have been implicated as reservoirs of the infection.
(11) The killing of badgers to somehow “save” dairy and beef cows is perverse.
(12) Badgers need to be trapped before they can be vaccinated, and the process will need to be repeated annually for many years, which makes it extremely expensive to use.
(13) Sera obtained from 2 groups of badgers removed in bovine tuberculosis control operations have been examined for antibodies to 11 species of mycobacteria.
(14) There has certainly been a raft of policy announcements: on a green investment bank , subsidies for domestic renewable energy , electric vehicles , high speed rail , even badgers .
(15) The risk is that it removes relatively few badgers; then the worst case scenario is not just the loss of the risk reduction observed in the RBCT but the possibility of actually increasing the risk to local cattle herds (such as observed in reactively culled areas of the RBCT).
(16) Matters worsened when on-the-ground surveys, costing almost £1m, discovered up to twice as many badgers in the first cull areas in Gloucestershire and Somerset.
(17) After the July ruling, which was welcomed by the National Farmers Union, the British Veterinary Association and the British Cattle Veterinary Association, a spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "No one wants to cull badgers but last year bovine TB led to the slaughter of over 26,000 cattle, and to help eradicate the disease it needs to be tackled in badgers."
(18) The relative importance of the two mating periods is reflected in the seasonal pattern of bite wounding in adult male badgers; minor bite wounding in January-March was 2.3 times as frequent as in August-October, and moderate-extensive bite wounding was 3.1 times more frequent.
(19) Serological results obtained in badgers and wild boars also demonstrates the absence of direct or indirect horizontal transmission of the recombinant virus.
(20) On the ground beneath their feet lived salamanders, amphibians and plenty of mammals, including the badger-sized beast, repenomamus, which dined on dead dinosaurs.
Ferret
Definition:
(n.) An animal of the Weasel family (Mustela / Putorius furo), about fourteen inches in length, of a pale yellow or white color, with red eyes. It is a native of Africa, but has been domesticated in Europe. Ferrets are used to drive rabbits and rats out of their holes.
(n.) To drive or hunt out of a lurking place, as a ferret does the cony; to search out by patient and sagacious efforts; -- often used with out; as, to ferret out a secret.
(n.) A kind of narrow tape, usually made of woolen; sometimes of cotton or silk; -- called also ferreting.
(n.) The iron used for trying the melted glass to see if is fit to work, and for shaping the rings at the mouths of bottles.
Example Sentences:
(1) The contralateral projection in all divisions of the CN of both albino and 'red eyed' ferrets was normal.
(2) Ferret preparations showed low levels of spontaneous activity, which was reduced by acidosis and enhanced by alkalosis.
(3) Class V cavities were prepared on the labial surfaces of the canine teeth of 18 male ferrets.
(4) In this study, Golgi-stained tissue was examined in order 1) to determine whether sex differences exist in dendritic dimensions of neurons from this region, and 2) to assess the effects of adult androgen treatment on dendritic morphology in ferrets of both sexes.
(5) Also, yohimbine treatment significantly reduced duration of recumbency in 10 of 11 ferrets (p = 0.0001).
(6) A survey was made of the density of the cholinergic innervation of different parts of the brainstem of the rat and ferret.
(7) Dense B-50-like immunoreactivity was localized in nerves throughout the wall of the rat, ferret and human small intestine, notably in the myenteric and submucous plexuses, where in the ferret ileum it co-localized with vasoactive intestinal polypeptide-immunoreactive fibre groups.
(8) Our results suggest that the vascular response of isolated ferret lungs to severe hypoxia consisted of separate early and late phases of vasoconstriction.
(9) Hormone levels were measured in frequent blood samples taken via an indwelling jugular cannula from sexually mature and castrated ferrets.
(10) The effects of gossypol acetic acid on isometric and isotonic contractions of isolated ferret heart ventricular muscle was recorded on a myograph.
(11) The ferret callosal cell distribution has a greater tangential extent in area 18 than in area 17.
(12) PACAP-like immunoreactivity was observed in nerve fibers in the gut wall of all species examined (chicken, mouse, rat, hamster, guinea-pig, ferret, cat, pig, sheep and man).
(13) In both groups of ferrets the oestradiol binding capacity of the uterus was approximately 10 times greater than that of the other tissues studied; of these other tissues the highest oestradiol binding capacity was present in the pituitary, followed by hypothalamus, midbrain, amygdala and cerebral cortex.
(14) Amrinone was found to increase phasic tension of ferret papillary muscles only for depolarizations lasting less than 250 to 300 msec.
(15) Unlike the cat, there is no difference in retinal decussation patterns in wild-type sable ferrets and heterozygous ferrets carrying one albino gene.
(16) We have compared the effects of three vasoactive agents, endothelin, platelet activating factor and thromboxane A2 analogue, U 46,619, in the pulmonary circulation of ferrets.
(17) The distribution of acetylcholinesterase and choline acetyltransferase in primary visual areas of adult pigmented ferret was determined with cholinesterase histochemistry and choline acetyltransferase immunohistochemistry.
(18) The neonatal ferret appears to be a useful model for assessing integrated epithelial structure-function relationships that are important not only during early development but also during repair after airway injury involving deciliation.
(19) The decussation patterns of retinal ganglion cells in adult pigmented and albino ferrets were determined from the distribution of cells labelled after large unilateral injections of horseradish peroxidase into the visual pathway, involving the lateral geniculate nucleus and fibres of passage to the superior colliculus.
(20) In the present study, the SV was examined light microscopically in sectioned material or whole-mounts from pigmented and albino animals of 5 species, including the cat, guinea pig, rabbit, ferret and mouse.