TREBOROUGH, England — At dusk these days, the crackle of gunfire echoes through this normally tranquil patch of countryside. It is the sound calling Jay Tiernan once more into the breach in Britain's raging Badger Wars.
One of hundreds of Britons who have rallied to the aid of the nocturnal badger, Tiernan — an animal rights activist decked out in full camouflage on a recent evening — jumped in the back seat of an SUV parked in front of a village pub. He greeted two brothers-in-arms and quickly surveyed their arsenal of topographical maps, strobe lights, whistles, and plastic bugles.
Their mission: disrupt a government-backed cull of an adored beast straight from the pages of English children's literature.
In the magical world of ''The Wind in the Willows,'' Mr. Badger was a cuddly curmudgeon with the wardrobe of a proper country squire. But in the real world, farmers here say, his kind have bred like ill-tempered, supercharged rabbits since becoming a protected species in 1973.
As badgers now run amok, they are spreading tuberculosis among cattle herds that has cost farmers and the British government a small fortune. A cull, advocates claim, is the only real solution.
But the notion of Mr. Badger at the wrong end of a shotgun has touched a deep nerve in this green and pleasant land, where the English maintain a near-obsessive attachment to picture-postcard countryside.
In a country where even the coolest hipsters regularly skip out of town for a little bird watching or just a ''ramble'' across emerald hills, taking aim at the badger has sparked an uproar that is claiming almost as much television airtime, Internet space, and newsprint here as the civil war in Syria.
A website — badger-killers.co.uk — is now naming and shaming British companies and politicians that support the cull. Guitarists Brian May of Queen and Slash of Guns N' Roses joined wildlife documentary host David Attenborough to record ''Badger Swagger,'' a rap anthem against the cull.
In the current cull zone in western England, the operation has turned neighbor against neighbor, while drawing volunteers from cities to ''Badger Patrols'' going out each evening.
Wearing yellow vests to warn off stray bullets and occasionally packing night-vision lenses, the patrols search out vantage points where suspected hunters gather. They then let rip a barrage of blowing whistles and flashing strobe lights into the star-filled valleys, warning badgers back into their dens and trying to break the concentration of hunters.
The most radical groups — such as Tiernan's Hunt Saboteurs — have resorted to an ''annoy'' campaign against pro-cull farmers, including trespassing on private property and crank calls in which activists sing a frightfully cheery badger song into the phone.
Tiernan was detained after breaking into a government research center where badger carcasses are being examined to determine how quickly they die after being shot.
''We don't have any vegan ninjas jumping out of trees, but we're doing what we can,'' Tiernan said as the SUV he was riding in sped through thatched-roof villages that looked straight out of Middle Earth.
''The badgers have been here since the Ice Age,'' he said. ''This is their land, not ours.''
Yet to the some, such as Adam Quinney of the National Farmers Union, whose family has ranched in England since the 16th century, the opposition to the cull is a classic case of city-dwellers with a romanticized view of the country.
Last year, about 28,000 head of cattle had to be sold to the government at reduced prices because of bovine tuberculosis, which officials said is spread by badgers. Cull supporters note that the spread of the disease rose in the 1990s, after badgers got more protections.
Activists say a humane solution would be a vaccination campaign to root out TB in badgers. Officials have dismissed that option as too expensive and probably ineffective.