Before those of you dreaming of the rural idyll, up sticks from your comfort zone of London and the S East, consider the experience we had here yesterday.
We live a mile down a no through road and then 3 more miles to a decent A road. Part way along that windy country lane leading to the A road we found a wheelie bin. Nothing odd you might think except we don’t HAVE wheelie bins here and it was half a mile from the nearest property, isolated on a road verge surrounded by fields. It has been there a few days but yesterday, someone or something had knocked it over and the lid had come open.
Inside was a collection of dead badgers and dead pheasants.
This is not the first time we have had barbaric “offerings” in this area. There was the collection of deer head and legs in a dustbin bag left with our and our neighbours’ piles of rubbish for our local bin men, and, a little before, a dead badger strung up from a telegraph pole.
There is an element of barbarism and brutality in all this which sickens and frightens me. Poaching and badger killing is illegal. Poaching makes good money for some and badgers are fair game to those who can’t cope with the maddening lack of solutions to the bTB problem. I am just as worried as the next person by bTB. Goats are vulnerable to it and we have dozens of badgers on our land. But this kind of gesture-driven behaviour does nothing to solve the problem or improve the image of the farmer – already seen as some sort of old-fashioned, ignorant peasant paid too much by the EU to keep animals badly. Clearly there ARE some like that but the majority of livestock farmers I know are NOT and would be just as disgusted by this exhibitionism as I am.
Remember this when you move to the country. The old ways abide as you might say and you had better be prepared for similar if you move to any but the most sanitised and incomer-flooded countryside.
This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Around us (in this rural village) we have a handful of so-called hunting / shooting types. They have high powered riffles, night scopes, silencers, and knives by the pocketful. They wear military-style camouflage kit, have webbing ammo belts, and commando style boots (and not infrequently seem to be ‘uniformed’ for large parts of the day). These guys have a couple of 4x4s with platform flat backs and cab mounted search lights.
Personally they frighten the ‘whatsit’ out of me because they do not talk and behave like the ‘sporting’ hunters I grew up with, they talk like professional exterminators. It’s as if they are on a military mission to avenge… something! I don’t have any doubt they poach and do very well at it.
However, I wouldn’t want me or mine to be in their line of sight just after dusk, and I certainly wouldn’t want pets or cared-for animals in it either. I imagine a none too scrupulous farmer with a ‘badger problem’ (or any other kind of animal problem) would not need to get his or her hands dirty with these chaps as ‘friends’.
Talking with friends around the countryside I get the impression this sort of macho commando-style shooting (at anything that moves?) is on the increase.
By: Carrie on February 16, 2013
at 5:34 pm
I am truly sorry you have had to experience these frightening episodes of inhumanity. It’s doubly troubling because we imagine cruelty in the city – not among the fields and fens. I trust that you and yours will continue to be safe.
By: Diane Wyzga (California) on February 17, 2013
at 1:24 am