On a crisp Sunday last weekend I showed some friends a small wood behind my house in the Peak District of Derbyshire. I bought the wood ten years ago, not least for the shelter it offers my llamas from the driving rain: the one thing in our English weather that they cannot cope with, having less natural oil in their wool than sheep. My female camelid, Imp, caught a nasty bout of pneumonia once.

Crossing their meadow we bid the llamas, Knapp, Imp and Ellie, good morning. “There are badgers in this wood, I’ve seen them walking down the track in the small hours,” I boast. And then, to my delight, we come upon some fresh earthworks. Clearly a new sett is under construction. How marvellous! My own badgers, my own wood, my own llamas grazing contentedly . . . an idyllic rural scene.

And now this. An e-mail arrives from Val Elliott, The Times’s countryside correspondent: “Hi Matthew. Bovine TB is affecting llamas. They are getting the disease from wildlife, probably badgers. Infected llamas have to be culled.”

Is this true? Are badgers really to blame? How do you spot TB in a llama? Do they cough?

They certainly spit. They spit all the time, mostly at each other – only it’s more like a mucal sneeze, and I’ve been caught in the stinking crossfire often enough . . . oh Lord, isn’t spitting one of the ways TB is carried and communicated? Wasn’t that behind the drive to ban public expectoration during Victorian times?

What am I to do? Gas the badgers? Move the llamas? Put up “No spitting” signs in the field? Close the wood to camelids and condemn them to pneumonia if not tuberculosis?

I shall simply hope for the best. But from now I shall lie awake at night, listening anxiously for the sound of a coughing badger, a spitting llama or the engine of an approaching Defra van. Farewell, rural innocence.

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