FROM HARE TO ETERNITY
Elizabeth Walton celebrates the high point of the hare-coursing year THE Waterloo Cup will be run for the 150th time next week and anyone who attends this blue riband event of English hare coursing is, so populist prejudice decrees, a sadist. Spirited socialist Lord Paget has made a stand against this atti- tude: it is bred, he claims, 'by Spite out of Emotion by Ignorance'.
It is the kill, of course, that offends the protesters and yet this is the only field sport where the object is not to kill the prey. Nevertheless, even the very first coursing expert, Flavius Arranius, suffered a brush with the antis and in 116 AD he defended his pastime. 'The true sports- man', he wrote, 'does not take out his dogs to destroy the hares, but for the sake of the course and the contest between the dogs and the hares, and is glad if the hare escapes.'
The hare is used as quarry to test the relative merits of two pedigree greyhounds who chase by sight, otherwise known as gazehounds. All the dogs can trace back their family tree on both sides to Czarina, the black bitch bred by flamboyant Lord Orford who founded the Swaffham Club and modern coursing in 1776. Another of his stylish diversions was driving his coach behind four red deer stags. The long history of coursing is embellished with rollicking characters who value action more highly than introspection.
The courser's most endearing trait is his genuine respect for animals: not a trace of anthropomorphism clouds his practicality. He understands that the natural order works by animals inflicting damage on other animals, so tricky moral dilemmas caused by working dogs doing what they are trained to do never keep him awake at night. The strict code of rules prescribed by the National Coursing Club ensures a balance between prey and predator, and the hares coursed in England are quite wild and always on their broad home fields. They are never handled, boxed or confined in any way.
Track racing would be a breeze to the lissom longdogs engaged in coursing — a mere test of pace. The effort and skill a dog puts into a course earn him points from the judge who is mounted to observe the action closely. The slipper is adorned like the judge in full hunting fig, and it is his athletic role to hold the straining hounds in the 'slips' — a double collared leash which can release them simultaneously. With a practised eye he assesses the hares driven past his shy by the beaters, and only when a strong adult hare has 80 yards' law' or lead on the dogs is he allowed to slip his charges.
With the hot breath of the dogs on her tail the hare can run at 35 mph and like all other prey species, she stays cool under pressure as she streaks for safety, ears flattened for better vision. The faster and luxuriously elegant greyhounds lengthen their stride and fly like the wind in pursuit, paws thudding on the cold ground.
Just when everything seems lost and the dogs sweep up to their quarry, she jinks twisting and turning at right angles with astonishing agility, and without losing speed. The far heavier dogs are flung past her, skidding and flailing until they can recover and attempt to return her to the route they prefer. Distant shouts of 'Good hare!' come from the appreciative coursers watching her bobbing acrobatics. This jink- ing is not an automatic defence reaction but the animal's method of working her way towards cover and freedom in a line of bare trees traced black against a lucid sky. There she will be lost to the dogs' keen eyes and the course will be over. Each dog wears a red or a white knitted collar and now the judge holds up a matching hand- kerchief to signify the winner of the 30- second drama.
The judge's decision is final but when Panini — a Waterloo Cup favourite — was signalled winner at the December New- market meeting there followed, records the Coursing Calendar primly, 'an unseem- ly demonstration'. Flat racing's star Grevil- le Starkey had his red fawn dog stolen at the same sensational meeting, but the animal became an embarrassment to the thieves, who handed it back.
Eighty-five per cent of the hares coursed in the last full season got clean away; 351 did not. When there is a kill it does not determine the winner or clearly most courses would be undecided. A single point can be scored for a kill if, say, the hare is picked up during the initial run up when no points have been scored, although this rarely happens. 'I doubt if more than six points are awarded in a whole season for a dog killing a hare,' confirms senior judge Mr Mills. 'The better the hares,' he adds, 'the better the coursing.'
The kill also makes no difference to the betting. Just three bookies had pitches at the last Waterloo meeting but in the golden glory days of the sport, some 80,000 followers of the leash turned out, and both William Hill and Joe Coral began their illustrious careers at Altcar. Even Queen Victoria joined in. When Lord Lurgan's dog Master McGrath won his third Water- loo Cup in 1871 and became a national ' hero, Her Majesty commanded the owner to bring the dog to Windsor with his trainer Mr Spooner for an audience, and ordered a special train for their journey.
No one in 1987 will win any popularity by associating himself with the Waterloo Cup. Urban chic insists that coursing is uniquely obnoxious, and there lies the dilemma. The sport is singled out for attack because it marks the divide between two worlds that have become cut off from one another, town and country. Myth has overtaken reality.
The sport's present-day grandee is the racehorse trainer, Sir Mark Prescott, Bart, and with all the dash and partiality of the amateur he claims to hanker after the louche life led by hares on a coursing estate. 'All you have to do', he explains with Old Harrovian subtlety, 'is run like f*** one day a year.' He and the antis display a brutal chivalry towards one another. 'They've promised not to break ranks,' he reports, as he allows them a ritual, contained demonstration, and he revels in an equal, urgent passion for the arguments and for the sport. When cours- ing was last called to account for itself in 1976, a Select Committee of the House of Lords said it should be left to the individual conscience.
There is no obvious glamour in this tiny beleaguered world whose very perversity justifies its existence, no possibility of the embourgeoisement that saves fox-hunting and nothing but mid-winter discomfort for the dedicated stalwarts as they shade their eyes against the low sunlight and warm themselves with sloe gin. 'Everything's going to die,' drawls an old Norfolk dog man, coursing born and bred. 'You don't really quarrel with Nature — you try and work with it.'
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