(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.
Sett
Definition:
(n.) See Set, n., 2 (e) and 3.
Example Sentences:
(1) 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.
(2) Badger baiting and sett interference, including tunnels being ploughed up by farmers or dug out by property developers, were the most frequently-reported incidents.
(3) The submaximum effort tourniquet technique (SETT) is becoming more widely used as part of the clinical assessment of chronic pain patients despite little information about the scaling of this technique.
(4) Somerset police have recorded three reports in the last 15 months: one for a badger killing and two for interfering with a badger sett.
(5) The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) response to the freedom of information request stated the trials aimed to "determine whether any available mechanisms have the potential to achieve humane and effective outcomes in real sett situations".
(6) The tests, at an undisclosed location, are examining how the poisons carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide flow through complex badger setts.
(7) If you put a high seat over a sett you could kill most of them fairly quickly.
(8) Two cases of CAGE treated by recompression after submarine escape tank training (SETT) accidents are described.
(9) Mead, an influential figure in the region, is in favour of gassing diseased badgers in their setts to control bovine TB in cattle, a technique which was scrapped by the government in 1982 after scientific experiments showed it was inhumane for badgers that received sub-lethal doses of the poison.
(10) Almost 700 incidents of badger persecution were reported in 2013, including badgers killed by dogs and snares and setts gassed with vehicle exhausts, according to a report by the Badger Trust .
(11) Investigations are continuing into eight of the 27 reports, which also includes illegal interference with setts.
(12) Badgers consistently avoided close contact with cattle by changing routes from sett to foraging site and by foraging much less in areas of fields occupied by cattle.
(13) "He confirmed the final licence conditions had yet to be met by the cullers but could be fulfilled at any time, meaning badgers could begin to be killed immediately.As winter approaches, time is fast running out for the cull to begin because badgers lie low in their setts in the cold weather.
(14) On the back flyleaf are the names of 26 plants, 22 of which were "To be sett & sawin in ye garding".
(15) Two residential floors for the disabled in a Home for the Jewish Aged were the setttings for this research.
(16) One hundred eleven impotent men and 25 potent men were prospectively evaluated with a standardized exercise treadmill test (SETT) used to noninvasively define their pelvic hemodynamics.
(17) The Badger Trust report details a wide range of badger persecution, such as poisoning and setts being burned out with petrol.
(18) Ratio scaling procedures resulted in a linear function, presumed to underlie clinical application of the SETT, for only 11% of the subjects.
(19) Animal welfare groups were further outraged when the ministry demonstrated how to use snares and Nature Conservancy, recognising political realities, urged gassing setts instead, which was considered humane by animal welfare organisations.
(20) Secret government trials of gassing badger setts have been underway since the summer of 2013, according to documents released under freedom of information rules on Thursday.