animal captured. Injured animals die slowly and painfully, and the public mood will shift when this becomes apparent."
The anti lobby: "If the fox is as dangerous as hunts claim, why do they use artificial earths to encourage their numbers? A gamekeeper recently admitted that for 30 years he's been producing foxes and pheasants for the hunt. If you're a keeper in hunting country, it's obligatory to provide an animal for the kill, otherwise you're out of a job."
The accusations and recriminations are bitter. The Countryside Alliance's pretense that it's a rural versus urban issue is as absurd as the League Against Cruel Sports' claim that no jobs will be lost if fox hunters make a "wholesome switch to drag hunting." Dislike of killing a native animal for sport is as strongly felt in rural areas as it is in the town, and the Woodland Trust, for one, refuses to allow hunts across its land. By contrast, drag hunting will only secure jobs if huntsmen, many of whom are farmers, can be persuaded that signing up to a group activity which offers no useful benefit to the community is worth their time and money.
Each side would like to paint the other as destroyers-of a way of life or of a vulnerable animal-but the verdict on whether or not hunting should be banned will rest on the public perception of the fox. It's not good news for the hunting lobby. Another recent opinion poll posed this choice: Place the following in order of the damage they do to the countryside: 1) foxes; 2) tourists; 3) New Age travelers. 98% of the respondents put travelers at the top; 2% (presumably huntsmen suspecting a trap) put foxes; 100% found tourists the least damaging because of the money they bring into rural economies.
Brer Fox in his red coat and white slippers appeals to us. A man on the dole in an unlicensed vehicle does not. The government should take note.
Vulpes vulgaris
is not an endangered species, yet he is busy acquiring protection status through the many campaigns to preserve him. It is the traveler who now enjoys the status of vermin. Such is the might of public opinion.
But since when was might right?
Anne Cattrell
4
SHENSTEAD-21 DECEMBER 2001
Bob Dawson leaned on his spade and watched his wife pick her way across the frost-covered vegetable garden to the back door of Shenstead Manor, her mouth turned down in bitter resentment against a world that had defeated her. Small and bent, her old face creased with wrinkles, she muttered to herself continuously. Bob could predict exactly what she was saying because she repeated it over and over again, day after day, in an unending stream that made him want to kill her.
It wasn't right for a woman of her age to be working still… She'd been a skivvy and a slave all her life… A seventy-year-old should be allowed her rest… What did Bob ever do except sit on a lawn mower in the summer…? How dare he keep ordering her up to the Manor… It wasn't safe to be in the house with the Colonel… Everyone knew that… Did Bob care…? Of course not… "You keep your mouth shut," he'd say, "or you'll feel the back of my hand… Do you want us to lose the roof over our heads…?"
Insight had faded a long time ago, leaving Vera's head full of martyred resentment. She had no understanding that she and Bob paid nothing for their house because Mrs. Lockyer-Fox had promised it to them for life. All she understood was that the Colonel paid her wages in return for cleaning, and her aim in life was to keep those wages from her husband. Bob was a bully and tyrant, and she squirreled away her earnings in forgotten hiding places. She liked secrets, always had done, and Shenstead Manor had more than most. She had cleaned for the Lockyer-Foxes for forty years, and for forty years they had taken advantage of her, with the help of her husband.
A clinical psychologist would have said that dementia had released the frustrated personality she had repressed since she married at twenty to improve herself and
The anti lobby: "If the fox is as dangerous as hunts claim, why do they use artificial earths to encourage their numbers? A gamekeeper recently admitted that for 30 years he's been producing foxes and pheasants for the hunt. If you're a keeper in hunting country, it's obligatory to provide an animal for the kill, otherwise you're out of a job."
The accusations and recriminations are bitter. The Countryside Alliance's pretense that it's a rural versus urban issue is as absurd as the League Against Cruel Sports' claim that no jobs will be lost if fox hunters make a "wholesome switch to drag hunting." Dislike of killing a native animal for sport is as strongly felt in rural areas as it is in the town, and the Woodland Trust, for one, refuses to allow hunts across its land. By contrast, drag hunting will only secure jobs if huntsmen, many of whom are farmers, can be persuaded that signing up to a group activity which offers no useful benefit to the community is worth their time and money.
Each side would like to paint the other as destroyers-of a way of life or of a vulnerable animal-but the verdict on whether or not hunting should be banned will rest on the public perception of the fox. It's not good news for the hunting lobby. Another recent opinion poll posed this choice: Place the following in order of the damage they do to the countryside: 1) foxes; 2) tourists; 3) New Age travelers. 98% of the respondents put travelers at the top; 2% (presumably huntsmen suspecting a trap) put foxes; 100% found tourists the least damaging because of the money they bring into rural economies.
Brer Fox in his red coat and white slippers appeals to us. A man on the dole in an unlicensed vehicle does not. The government should take note.
Vulpes vulgaris
is not an endangered species, yet he is busy acquiring protection status through the many campaigns to preserve him. It is the traveler who now enjoys the status of vermin. Such is the might of public opinion.
But since when was might right?
Anne Cattrell
4
SHENSTEAD-21 DECEMBER 2001
Bob Dawson leaned on his spade and watched his wife pick her way across the frost-covered vegetable garden to the back door of Shenstead Manor, her mouth turned down in bitter resentment against a world that had defeated her. Small and bent, her old face creased with wrinkles, she muttered to herself continuously. Bob could predict exactly what she was saying because she repeated it over and over again, day after day, in an unending stream that made him want to kill her.
It wasn't right for a woman of her age to be working still… She'd been a skivvy and a slave all her life… A seventy-year-old should be allowed her rest… What did Bob ever do except sit on a lawn mower in the summer…? How dare he keep ordering her up to the Manor… It wasn't safe to be in the house with the Colonel… Everyone knew that… Did Bob care…? Of course not… "You keep your mouth shut," he'd say, "or you'll feel the back of my hand… Do you want us to lose the roof over our heads…?"
Insight had faded a long time ago, leaving Vera's head full of martyred resentment. She had no understanding that she and Bob paid nothing for their house because Mrs. Lockyer-Fox had promised it to them for life. All she understood was that the Colonel paid her wages in return for cleaning, and her aim in life was to keep those wages from her husband. Bob was a bully and tyrant, and she squirreled away her earnings in forgotten hiding places. She liked secrets, always had done, and Shenstead Manor had more than most. She had cleaned for the Lockyer-Foxes for forty years, and for forty years they had taken advantage of her, with the help of her husband.
A clinical psychologist would have said that dementia had released the frustrated personality she had repressed since she married at twenty to improve herself and
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