by Bob
We’d follow mink hounds now and then too, between April and October, through the streams and small rivers all around Berkeley. Mink hounds were once called otterhounds and they have a shaggy coat and are as big as a Labrador. The hunt would draw waterways, searching for the mink and, when one was found, the chase was on and the foot followers would often have to take to the water to keep up. The mink we have here in this country ain’t native; they’re American animals that were brought over here for fur-farming in the 1920s and here’s a bit of history for you. Fur-farming was at its peak in the 1950s, with four hundred farms in the UK – and there were also many illegal backyard operators. Plenty of the animals escaped and established themselves in the wild by the 1960s, reverting to their original chocolate-brown colour and spreading over England and Wales. The government tried to eradicate the wild mink population in 1964, but it was too little and too late. Animal activists attacked the fur-farms in the 1990s and released loads more of ’em and fur-farming was banned altogether in 2000.
We rented out an old abandoned mink farm near Bradley Stoke and we kept about a hundred greyhounds there – I think I told you how Bob used to make me walk there if I was up late as a boy. Bradley Stoke is a new town in South Gloucestershire now, on the north side of Bristol. It was built in the 1990s and people who bought properties there were hit by the housing crash of the same decade, so the town got the nickname ‘Sadly Broke’. Anyway, we coursed the dogs across the farmland that was there before all the building and, not so long ago, the body of a young boy was found on a rubbish tip, not a stone’s throw from where we had those kennels. He was abducted in London and abused and murdered by a paedophile, before his body was discarded. As far as I know, they caught the culprit – but I can’t be sure. I could never understand how a man could hurt a child like that – or a woman either. But then, I suppose the world’s a twisted place at times and it might be something to do with the shit food people eat, or some subliminal sickness they see on the television.
To get back to the mink – they’re still spreading in some parts of the country and nobody knows how to deal with them, especially since the banning of hunting with dogs. Mink are bad little buggers – they kill everything. When a company of mink, or a gang, as they’re sometimes called, goes through an area, they’ll kill mollies [moor hens] and coots and take the eggs and attack domestic fowls and water voles and other wildlife. They hunt over several miles, in ones and twos mostly and, when they’ve eaten everything, they’ll move on. They used to be valuable for their pelts but women ain’t wearing fur coats no more, and although they’re expanding out to more remote regions, there’s not as many round here as there used to be – just like all the other wildlife. We used to hunt them along the Little Avon, following the hounds and setting fenn traps that would snap shut and most times kill them instantly.
This is how we’d do it with the traps – it’s natural for mink or stoats or weasels to go through holes, so we make a tunnel out of stones or bricks and put a top of small logs on it and cover it over with dead grass and little twigs. We set the trap in there, baited with a bit of mackerel. Fenn traps baited like that also draw rats and squirrels. They’re all classed as vermin – they’ll destroy pheasant nests and have the eggs and kill the chicks and they’ll kill rabbits as well. The fenn trap is humane – it snaps shut and, like I said, most times it kills them instantly. There’s a safety catch on the trap so you don’t break your fingers. Pull the catch down and open the jaws, then lift the plate up and slide the pin across – now it’s set. You can adjust the trigger for different levels of weight needed to spring the trap, then take the safety off and that’s it. Simple.
Years ago, poachers used gin traps a lot of the time – though Bob says he didn’t – but they were made illegal. A gin trap is a mechanical device with teeth and they were good enough at doing their job. There were different sizes – for fox and badger and rabbit and smaller ones for rats. The name ‘gin’ comes from the word ‘engine’, which was used in the old days to describe any mechanical device and the word was just abbreviated for convenience. There’s no safety on them, so you had to be heedful or you’d lose a few fingers or even a hand.
You got your jaws, you got your plate, and you set it – carefully. The reason the gin got a bad name is because most people set them in rabbit runs in long grass and, more often than not, they caught an animal by the leg instead of killing it outright. Rabbit comes along and, snap, its leg’s caught – and it can wear the leg down to the bone trying to get free. Sometimes I found keepers’ traps with just the leg left in there. But that’s people who don’t know how to use them properly. The right way was to set them in the burrow entrance – making sure the jaws had enough room to close and the rabbit got caught by the head and killed instantly.
I glue corn to fenn traps to catch pheasants nowadays. This is how it works: I feed the pheasants under a bin first – put feed down every day for them. Then I put the fenn traps down, keep the safety on and chuck corn around them. The pheasants get used to the traps – pecking around, pecking around, but the traps don’t go off because the safety’s on. Then, when the birds are used to them, I glue corn to them with super glue and take the safety off. The pheasants peck at the corn, but it’s glued down – so they peck harder, until they spring the trap.
Like I’ve been saying, the trouble with traps is, you got to keep checking them in case what you’ve caught gets taken by predators or other poachers. Or, if a keeper comes upon them, he’ll lie in wait and try to catch you when you come back. But they have their uses if you don’t want to risk the noise of a gun – they’re silent and you can just leave them to do your work for you. Traps and snares have been used by tribes of people since we first crawled up out of the slime and many places still use them so people can catch what they need to eat. Bob met a Mongolian once, who came over here to be further educated and lost all touch with who he was and what his homeland meant to him. He was a sad man, Bob said, who dreamt about his roots and was wandering the world like a lost soul. And maybe I’ll go to Mongolia someday. Start in the south and tramp north across the Gobi Desert and the sea of grass they call the Steppe. Stop beside the turquoise waters of Lake Telmen and listen to the dull drone of the insects being all the time eaten by the busy birds. Sit by a cool stream at the foot of some hillside with the scent of strange flowers and the colours of the kaleidoscope world all around me.
Who knows? Maybe.
Getting back to country activities, a cockfight’s a blood sport between two gamecocks, or fighting cocks, which takes place in a ring called a cockpit. Two mature male birds will fight to the death, or until one of them’s so badly injured it can’t fight any more. Game fowl ain’t like ordinary domestic chickens, that’s because they’re bred for fitness rather than egg production or meat. The territorial instinct of the males is what gives them their aggression; they’ll fight each other no matter if they’re trained to do it or not. It’s their natural instinct. ‘Gameness’ is the term for the aggressiveness of a bird – the more aggressive it is and the more willing to fight, the gamer it is. A ‘game’ bird will keep on fighting, even if it’s badly injured.
We used to keep twenty or thirty fighting cocks in trios, two hens to lay eggs and a cock to fertilise them. We kept them in separate pens in the garden and fought them between ourselves for the sport, not for money or betting. To fight them out with other people, like Gypsies, brings trouble. Then you get asked where you live and the next thing people are coming round stealing your birds and dogs too, if you have any. We kept Old English game birds, which was one of the oldest strains of poultry. The breed was developed through the Middle Ages by the English nobility for its fighting traits and eye-catching colours. And although cockfighting became illegal in England in 1835, we still kept and fought the birds while others just kept them for showing. Fighting’s what a gamecock wants to do. It doesn’t need to be forced into it; it’ll just fight no matter what.
We free-ranged th
e stags [young males] because it was better for their diet and fitness and immunity against disease, although it was riskier if there were foxes about. No matter how game a young cock was, he’d be no match for a fox. When they began to fight with each other, we’d have to separate them to prevent injuries. They’d have to be kept away from other fowls like ducks or geese as well and that didn’t mean just putting up a piece of chicken wire. A young stag will go through wire mesh and this could result in injuries to his feet and legs.
Cocks ain’t fought until they’re nearly two years old. We’d spar them first, covering their natural spurs with a soft cloth to prevent injury to the sparring birds. This would give us an idea how good a bird was going to be. Natural spurs grow to about two or three inches and if the bird was going to fight ‘naked heel’, they’d be left as they were. Otherwise, the natural spurs would be sawn off and the bird would be armed with metal spurs, called gaffs, which have a socket that fits over the butt of the natural spur.
At about a year old, the comb and wattle are trimmed back – this is called dubbing and is done to prevent the opponent bird from getting a bill-hold and gaining an advantage during a fight. The sickle feathers of the tail would be trimmed too, along with any other long feathers that the cock might trip on during a contest. Along with that, bulky feathers can overheat a bird in a long fight and hamper its agility. A couple of weeks before a fight, the cock will be conditioned like a professional athlete with what’s called the ‘keep’. It’s a special diet and exercise and it gets the cock used to its handler, so it can be picked up during the fight without causing damage. Cocks that are aggressive towards their keepers makes for problems during the keep, and if it turns on its handler in the pit the other cock will take advantage of it. Like I said, cockfighting’s been banned for a long time. But it still goes on during the year, apart from the autumn, when the cocks moult and grow new feathers.
You may or may not agree with blood sports and that’s your prerogative. There’s some I hold with and others I don’t. Badger-digging’s one I don’t, even though I did when I was younger. I liked the terriers and was of the mind that each should be left to his own. But I don’t hold with it now – it’s a countryside activity that’s not for me and I don’t bother with, no more than I bothered with fox-hunting when the bum-bouncers were at it up and down the land. You could eat a badger one time, but you could never eat a fox so, unless they’re doing damage to your livelihood, like killing lambs or chickens, then leave them alone.
Illegal badger-digging with dogs goes on a lot in Wales, just over the border from where we are. It’s at its peak between January and June, when a sow badger can fight for up to eight hours to protect her cubs. Because the badger’s such a fearless animal and a ferocious fighter, it’s a prime target for terrier men who want to test their dogs. Lakelands and Patterdales and Jack Russells and all kinds of cross-breeds get sent down into the sett to locate a badger and keep it at bay. The men listen for where the noise is coming from, much like with ferreting, then dig down and drag the badger out. Sometimes the dogs and badgers can die if the sett collapses and suffocates them.
If they’re just there for the dig and a bit of sport, the diggers will set their dogs on the badger there and then and the badger’s usually outnumbered and killed, but the dogs can get seriously injured too. Badgers are normally shy animals and keep to themselves, but they become very aggressive when cornered or provoked. A badger has great strength and a bite or a blow from one of its claws can do a dog proper damage. Many dogs that get badly injured during badger-digging are shot, because their owners are nervous about bringing them to the vet in case the vet gets suspicious about where the injuries came from.
If the diggers are into baiting, then the animal will be picked up with badger tongs, because they’re strong creatures and can have a hand off someone, and put in a heavy box and taken away to be baited later. This involves going somewhere quiet and remote where the noise won’t be heard – maybe a barn or a big shed or a cellar or a derelict building of some kind. A ring’s set up that the badger can’t escape from and dogs are set on it. Even if the badger fights off the first dog, it has to fight a second and a third and a fourth and so on, until it’s too injured and exhausted to fight on. The baiters will then kill the badger with a gun or club or let their dogs kill it for the blooding. There’s always a lot of betting involved and a winning dog’s value will rise – and so will the value of its pups. Badgers being caught and sold for baiting can fetch as much as £500, so you can see why lots want to be doing it.
Badger-digging and-baiting were once seen as true country sports but both are banned now like a lot of others. Personally, although I did a bit of it a long time ago, I never got involved to a great extent, because it’s not a real sport to me – and it can be just cruelty for the sake of making money. Nowadays, they say badgers spread tuberculosis to cattle and the ministry men set cage traps with peanuts for the animals they want to tag or cull. I’ve nicked some of the traps over the years and used them for catching foxes that were taking my pheasants or rabbits. Foxes will take game from land rented by us. We’ll take the pheasants off the estates and release them on land where we have permission – if foxes come and start taking those pheasants, then I’ll trap them and shoot them. I’ll shoot any vermin I come across as well – crows and magpies and squirrels and feral cats and the odd Conservative councillor. Ha ha!
A farmer came to me once and told me that foxes were killing his lambs and could I do something about it. I didn’t normally kill foxes, except when they came after our ducks, but I agreed to help him in return for him allowing us to shoot on his land. I took an earthing terrier with me and I soon found the fox den. I sent the terrier in and started to dig. After about twenty minutes, one of the foxes bolts, with the terrier clinging to its back by its teeth. I’m trying to get it with my gun, but it’s a tricky shot – a moving target with a small dog hanging from its back, which I don’t want to shoot. I take aim and pull the trigger. The fox falls and so does the terrier. I run to where they are, but the dog’s alright, still clinging to what it believes is its kill. It’s a good shot – and a good dog! In the next field, there’s a nine- inch land drain, fenced off. It comes out in a ditch about a hundred yards away. The ditch is flooded – the water must’ve been backed up in the pipe for quite a way. After about five minutes, another fox comes out of the pipe in a big bubble and starts to run away. I let him get about thirty yards then shoot him dead. I think it’s strange that the foxes would be in a flooded drain but what’s happening is some animal rights people are cage-trapping city foxes and releasing them in the countryside, to stop them being shot by pest controllers. There’s a sudden increase in fox activity in this area and the city foxes have mange, which can spread to the country population. Country foxes wouldn’t be in a drain like that and the ones I shoot are scrawny things, used to scavenging for food and not hunting. I get four foxes out of the one earth that day.
Now, I know a lot of people won’t want to read about me shooting foxes. Townspeople think they’re nice cuddly ginger dogs. And I’ve got nothing personal against the fox, but if they were coming into where you worked and affecting how you were able to make your living, you’d soon be asking someone like me to get them out of there. Or if they killed your pet cat, or bit your baby, or dragged the rubbish out of your bins, or shat all over your nicely manicured lawn. Because foxes look so handsome, not ugly like the rat, people are never going to agree on how to control them.
Like I said, it’s not personal.
That’s just a few of the country activities of years ago. Most of them ain’t allowed any more – because everything changes and nothing’s certain these days and friends and foes are all mixed up and indistinguishable. Except for some of the buggers, who’ll never be any different. But the world evolves, if that’s the right word, and us in it must conform in the end, with the winds of change that continue to blow. And, like the Mongolian said to my father, outsiders w
on’t be tolerated forever.
19
Brian – Into the Wild
Some people say China’s soon to become the world’s leading producer of consumer goods, but it’ll all probably be a load of old nonsense that nobody needs, to add to the mountain of useless waste straining the world’s natural resources. They’ve already got the billionaires and the shining stars and I wonder if they’ll have a Xiznyland and a Xolywood too? But it’s not all progress and promise in the world; there’s reports that the Yanks are making it compulsory for the biblical account of creation to be taught in all secular schools – born-again brain washing.
Nowadays, I like to travel further afield than just the West Country. Every October, I go with my brother Robert up to Aberdeenshire in Scotland, decoying geese and ducks and teal. We stay on a farm and go wildfowling on the foreshore along the eastern seaboard of an evening, before it gets dark. Or we trek inland and set up our hide and decoys in barley stubble and wait for the geese to fly in from the likes of Cotehill Loch or the Loch of Strathbeg to feed on the gleanings. There can be up to eighty thousand geese flocking at that time of year, before the weather hardens and they move on down the east coast to places like Norfolk and even across to Normandy. If we see them out in the fields, provided they’ve not eaten everything and are ready to move on, they’ll fly in again the next day.