Police have arrested a 32-year old man from Ede in Gelderland for killing badgers using three dogs.

There are no exact figures of how many badgers, a protected species, are killed by poachers every year, Wim Vosgezang of the provincial Nature monitoring body told local paper De Gelderlander.

“It is very difficult to prove unless we find poisoned bait or dead badgers in unusual spots. We find evidence of badger killing two or three times a year but that is probably the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

According to badger protection organisation Das&Boom, badgers are being killed by pouring manure or gas into the sett. “The badger is almost always at home. If you destroy a sett you will destroy all the badgers in it. That can be a family with two or three young but there are setts with up to 20 badgers,” ecologist Marco Moonen said.

Police have not said how many badgers the man killed but he struck at a time when the badgers are raising their young and are at their most vulnerable, Moonen said.

It is not clear if the man was badger baiting, i.e. sending his dogs down the sett to attack the badgers before digging them out and killing them, or whether he used the dogs to locate them. Police confiscated the dogs and have not said what breed they are.

Das&Boom estimates there are between 6,000 and 7,000 badgers left in the Netherlands, with a population of about 1,500 in Gelderland.

The national population was twice as big but in the 1060s hunting and increasing traffic reduced their number to 1,200. The badger became a protected species in the 1980s.

That status became a headache for Dutch Rail last year when badgers built setts underneath rail tracks in some 40 places. Rail network manager ProRail had to apply for permission to evict the badgers and tempt them into an artificial setts nearby.