According to a recent Mori survey, 83% of people polled found hunting with dogs either cruel, unnecessary, unacceptable, or outdated. But even if the prime minister makes good his recent pledge to ban fox hunting before the next election, the debate will continue.
The pro lobby argues that the fox is vermin and will need to be controlled whether hunting is banned or not. "No government can legislate against the fox's predatory instincts. Once inside the wire, he will kill every chicken in the run, not because he's hungry but because he enjoys killing. Currently 250,000 foxes are culled annually to keep the numbers at an acceptable level. Without hunting, the fox population will grow out of control and people's attitudes will change."
The anti lobby disagrees. "Like any other animal, the fox adapts to its environment. If a farmer fails to protect his stock then he can expect it to be preyed upon. That's Nature. Cats kill for enjoyment but no one's suggesting we set a pack of hounds on the family moggy. Where's the sense in blaming the fox when the debate should be about animal husbandry?"
The pro lobby: "Hounds dispatch cleanly and quickly while snares, traps, and shooting are unreliable methods of control, often leading to severe injury with no guarantee that the fox is the 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 chose the wrong man. Bob's ambition had been satisfied by a rent-free tied cottage in return for lowly paid gardening and cleaning duties at Shenstead Manor. Vera's ambitions had been to own a house, raise a family, and select her customers herself.
The few close neighbors they'd had had long since moved away, and the new ones avoided her, unable to cope with her obsessional loops. Bob might be a taciturn man who eschewed company, but at least he still had his marbles and patiently tolerated her attacks on him in public. What he did in private was his own concern, but the way Vera smacked him whenever he contradicted her suggested they were no strangers to physical conflict. Nevertheless, sympathy tended to be with Bob. No one blamed him for pushing her out of the house to work up at the Manor. A man would go mad with Vera for company all day.
Bob watched her feet drag as she looked toward the southwest corner of the Manor. Sometimes she talked about seeing Mrs. Lockyer-Fox's body on the terrace… shut out in the cold night and left to freeze to death with next to nothing on. Vera knew about cold. She was cold all the time, and she was ten years younger than Mrs. Lockyer-Fox.
Bob threatened her with the back of his hand if she repeated in public the stuff about the door being locked, but it didn't stop the muttering. Her affection for the dead woman had grown exponentially since Ailsa's death, all recriminations forgotten in sentimental remembrance of the many kindnesses Ailsa had shown her. She wouldn't have insisted on a poor old woman working beyond her time. She would have said the time had come for Vera to rest.
The police had paid her no attention, of course-not after Bob had screwed his finger into his forehead and told them she was gaga. They smiled politely and said the Colonel had been cleared of any involvement in his wife's death. Never mind that he'd been alone in the house… and the French windows onto the terrace could only be locked and bolted from the inside. Vera's sense of injustice remained strong but Bob cursed her roundly if she expressed it.
It was a can of worms that shouldn't be opened. Did she think the Colonel would take her accusations lying down? Did she think he wouldn't mention her thieving or how angry he'd been to find his mother's rings gone? You don't bite the hand that feeds you, he warned her, even if the same hand had been raised in anger when the Colonel found her rifling through his desk drawers.
Occasionally, when she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, Bob wondered if she was more lucid than she pretended. It worried him. It meant there were thoughts inside her head that he couldn't control…