(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.
Weasel
Definition:
(n.) Any one of various species of small carnivores belonging to the genus Putorius, as the ermine and ferret. They have a slender, elongated body, and are noted for the quickness of their movements and for their bloodthirsty habit in destroying poultry, rats, etc. The ermine and some other species are brown in summer, and turn white in winter; others are brown at all seasons.
Example Sentences:
(1) Brown weasels and white animals undergoing the spring change to the brown pelage and reproductive activity molted, grew a new white coat, and became reproductively quiescent after treatment.
(2) It is suggested that the pineal gland product, melatonin, initiates changes in the central nervous system and endocrines which result in molting, growth of the white winter pelage, and reproductive quiescence in the weasel.
(3) He said: “We regret if our reporting led anyone to mistakenly assume that the ABC supported the asylum seekers’ claims.” Johnston said: “The good men and women of the Australian navy have been maliciously maligned by the ABC, and I am very dissatisfied of the very weasel words of apology that have been floated around.” “I have not said much because, I have to confess, I was extremely angry.
(4) While, today, none of us would take seriously politicians who bandy such weasel words about, these were quite the thing in the 60s.
(5) Their job involves eradicating animals that might want to eat these small game birds: foxes, stoats, weasels and, in the days when it was legal to do so, birds of prey.
(6) South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham was happy to go back on his weasel words of last week and congratulate Haley.
(7) So, until we see the parties at Westminster supporting and calling for the unity of the Irish people, we can only believe that the great calls of Cameron, Miliband and Clegg to the Scottish people are just weasel words intended to gull them into accepting the Westminster unionists’ status quo.
(8) The Catholic father in Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall is just the most implacable enemy of nice-as-pie communists showing everyone a good time; the village imam in Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Winter Sleep is an ingratiating, smirking creep; and the local rev in The Homesman (as played by John Lithgow) is definitely a weasel, rather too obviously grateful not to have to transport three traumatised frontierwomen back east.
(9) Two short-tailed weasels tremored slightly within 10 min of arousal.
(10) To call Hoxha “tough” is more than a bit of a weasel word.
(11) They are members of the otter, badger and weasel family (the mustelids), that are at home both on the ground and in the trees.
(12) Paragonimus kellicotti Ward, 1908 was recovered from 16 of 105 mink (Mustela vison), 14 of 244 striped skunks (Mephitis mephitis), 10 of 446 red foxes (Vulpes vulpes), 1 of 31 coyotes (Canis latrans), 0 of 326 raccoons (Procyon lotor) and 0 of 8 weasels (Mustela spp.)
(13) Muscular sarcosporidiosis is reported for the first time in the common European weasel, Mustela nivalis.
(14) Mike Pence’s weasel-speak in defense of Indiana’s RFRA wasn’t the political mistake.
(15) At a town hall in Willingboro, New Jersey, MacArthur was branded a “weasel”, a “killer” and an “idiot”.
(16) But a new managerialism – already familiar in universities and post-Kennett reforms – has infected the community sector, with weasel words its most obvious symptom.
(17) A 5 min exposure to the weasel elicited an analgesic response of longer duration (15-30 min) that was sensitive to both naloxone and the benzodiazepine agonist and antagonist.
(18) Over lunch, Clements is cheerful, charming and fizzing with ideas, so it is surprising to learn that colleagues once labelled him a "little weasel" and worse in a court case.
(19) - Victor Klemperer, 13 June 1934 We're fed this inert this lying phrase like comfort food as another little Palestinian boy in trainers jeans and a white teeshirt is gunned down by the Zionist SS whose initials we should - but we don't - dumb goys - clock in that weasel word crossfire
(20) However, the fence was only 2 feet (0.6 meter) high and did not stop the entrance of foxes, weasels, shrews, or avian predators.