Top ten fictional badgers

John Dougherty is a children’s author, poet, and songwriter. In his Stinkbomb and Ketchup-Face books, the badgers are the bad guys ... as disruptive as actual badgers.

One of Dougherty's top ten fictional badgers, as shared at the Guardian:

The lendri (from Watership Down by Richard Adams)

Early on in the story, the rabbits encounter a creature with grinning jaws, eyes “full of savage cunning”, and blood on its lips. It was slightly shocking, as a child reading this for the first time, to encounter a fictional badger that wasn’t wise and kind. Its “fierce, terrible stare” introduced me to a whole new way of looking at badgers, which is why a creature that only gets a couple of paragraphs in the whole book deserves almost as much here. Besides which, I’ll take any excuse to sneak Watership Down into my top 10 list of anything.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Watership Down is on Piers Torday's top ten list of animal villains; it is a book Junot Díaz hopes parents will read to their kids.

--Marshal Zeringue