(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.
Skunk
Definition:
(n.) Any one of several species of American musteline carnivores of the genus Mephitis and allied genera. They have two glands near the anus, secreting an extremely fetid liquid, which the animal ejects at pleasure as a means of defense.
(v. t.) In games of chance and skill: To defeat (an opponent) (as in cards) so that he fails to gain a point, or (in checkers) to get a king.
Example Sentences:
(1) To our knowledge, this is the first documentation of the successful seroconversion of skunks and raccoons vaccinated against rabies in the field.
(2) Morphological interactions of tropholbast and uterus from stages of preimplantation and implantation were studied in 14 western spotted skunks.
(3) This is the first report of a high rate of immunization of skunks with a rabies vaccine administered orally.
(4) In three cases (fox, raccoon, skunk) SAFA titers were greater than mouse SN titers.
(5) Blastocysts collected from the spotted skunk during delay of implantation, early activation and late activation demonstrate three-tiered growth and developmental changes.
(6) Batmanghelidjh helped him come off skunk and found a sympathetic private tutor to make up his lost years of schooling.
(7) The only significant management change prior to illness was the feeding of poplar tree branches from a lowland area inhabited by skunks and raccoons.
(8) Additionally, challenge virus standard (CVS) rabies virus and mutants of this and ERA rabies virus (CVS 3766 and 3713, and ERA 3629) that were resistant to neutralization by specific antiglycoprotein monoclonal antibodies (and apathogenic in mice) were tested by various routes in skunks.
(9) Infection of CER and murine neuroblastoma (clone N18) cell cultures by inoculation of brain tissue from rabid skunks, dogs, equines, foxes, bats and cows was detected by immunofluorescence 2--5 days after inoculation.
(10) Electrophoretic zymogram patterns of the T. cruzi populations isolated from opossums and skunks were similar to isoenzyme profiles already described for populations isolated from infected humans in Argentina.
(11) The skunks were subjected to a natural photoperiod.
(12) The number and geographic distribution of rabies cases in striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis) from Saskatchewan (n = 2,506 cases), Montana (n = 1,142), and Alberta (n = 199) since 1963 were reviewed.
(13) A new recombinant rabies vaccine (human adenovirus 5 containing the rabies glycoprotein gene) was given to striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis) and red foxes (Vulpes vulpes).
(14) On the other hand, the virus from the brains of skunks from Ontario readily infected neuroblastoma but poorly infected baby hamster kidney cell cultures.
(15) It didn't lure me astray – I'm done with my youthful experimenting – but it did occur to me that it was not all that helpful to parents trying to warn their kids not to try skunk when they could sample it just by breathing the air.
(16) Expecting a bold "liveable streets" approach from it is like asking a skunk to smell sweet.
(17) Percentage infection was 5% (n = 22) for ticks from skunks and 14% (n = 191) for ticks from raccoons.
(18) The similarity of lesions and the finding of inclusions diagnostic of canine distemper virus (CDV) in some skunks indicated that CDV may be the main cause of neurologic disease in nonrabid skunks.
(19) Leptospira interrogans serotype pomona was isolated from the kidneys of a normal striped skunk (Mephitis mephitis hudsonicus) collected near Kindersley, Saskatchewan.
(20) 12 female skunks were hypophysectomized during the 7-month preimplantation period.