The night before last, my husband slaughtered a mouse. This was at odds with my own domestic policy on rodent control, which is to put out humane traps, which the mice usually laugh at.

But at least you face next to no moral censure when you kill a mouse. I happen to be rather fond of them but public opinion runs strongly the other way. Which just goes to show how arbitrary is our approach to our fellow mammals.

This bloodshed may be why I was so struck by the heated reaction to the cull of badgers in areas affected with bovine TB on Farming Today the next morning. One irate listener rang in to say that he would not only be joining his local badger support group, he would be boycotting anything produced by British farmers until the National Farmers’ Union backed down. It was a bit like the foxhunting debate, except that the badgers will be shot rather than chased with hounds and will have rather less chance of escape. If they’re lucky, they’ll be gassed with carbon monoxide.

Badgers are one of the favoured animals that can mobilise public support. Like foxes, they can get people worked up about their annihilation. And it is this capriciousness in our sentimentality about animals that makes the whole debate about animal rights so problematic. I am no more rational than anyone – I would have no qualms trying out the recipe in Fergus Henderson’s new cookbook for grey squirrel stew because they’re vermin and interlopers, but when, as a child, I was given horse for dinner by a Belgian family, I felt as revolted as if I were being asked to eat baby.

I’m not sure the answer lies in our evolutionary past. We seem to have had domesticated dogs about 14,000 years ago; sheep and goats about 10,000 years ago; and the horse only about 6,000 years ago. But in the scale of our affections, sheep, goats and cattle come well behind horses and dogs. It may be that we’re grateful for their affection – dogs and horses love us, sheep and goats don’t. But plainly, not every culture is as well disposed towards dogs as the British are – one of the unspoken divisions between the Islamic world and the West is that Muslims, on the whole, don’t care for dogs much, whereas, like Muhammad himself, they tend to be rather fond of cats.

The only explanation for why badgers arouse such strong emotions has to lie in children’s literature. Half the members of the Badger Trust must have been reared on The Wind in the Willows. It may not have transformed the PR for toads and moles but it unquestionably did the trick for badgers. We shall see whether the film Ratatouille, whose hero is the rat Remy, does the same for rodents. I doubt it. Vegetarians, Peta and Stella McCartney have yet to picket the offices of Rentokil. But watch them turn out for the badgers.

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