Badgers know a thing or two about burying a dead body. At least that’s what scientists at the University of Utah discovered when they set security cameras facing a dead calf in Utah’s Grassy Mountains.
Researchers thought the calf had been dragged away when they discovered the spot completely empty, but when they checked the tapes, they found out the calf was right where they left it, it had just been buried by a badger.
Behavioral patterns of the badgers aren’t widely known, so this video sheds a lot of new light on the species. The fact that the badger spent five days burying the cow shows either an incredible resolve or an unquenched love for digging. Fortunately for us, the dig montage was accompanied by the Benny Hill theme song, making it that much more epic.
“We know a lot about badgers morphologically and genetically, but behaviorally there’s a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled,” says senior Ethan Frehner. “This is a substantial behavior that wasn’t at all known about.”
“Watching badgers undertake this massive excavation around and underneath is impressive,” he continued.
