IT'S A JOB FOR A DOG
If you want to rid your back garden of foxes, says Robert Gore-Langton,
buy a lurcher
WHATEVER it was that won Crufts earlier this year, it wasn't a dog. It was, more like, the love-child of Danny La Rue and a vast gerbil. With huge blobs of white fluff and patches of chicken skin, this coiffured quadruped was a glaring example of what happens when dog breeders go pedigreemad. They end up with award-winning powder puffs about as stupid as cows. It is outrageous that while these animals are given rosettes, real dogs with real jobs are under threat.
If hunting is banned, according to a recent report by Miles Cooper, a former 'undercover operative' for the League Against Cruel Sports, as many as 20,000 hounds, 100,000 terriers and 70,000 lurchers face a one-way trip to the vet, I can't vouch for the statistics, but no wonder the animal-welfare lobbies are schizoid. For every one fox preserved, three dogs and a healthy horse will get the bullet. Meanwhile the fox population in London alone is steadily rising to the point where they will soon outnumber rats.
Down here in Bristol the place is also overrun with them. They are looked after by the city council's Task-Centred Fox Support Initiative, which actively seeks to 'reverse verminist philosophies and embed fox welfare within a challenging urban context'. All right, I made that up — but the fact is that foxes (or 'persons of fur', as we may soon have to refer to them) have the run of the town while the stray dogs get banged up.
The pet market will soon be flooded with redundant hunting dogs needing to be 'rehomeff. We should all buy one. I have. With hounds, of course, you have to buy a whole pack, which could be problem if, say, you live in a flat. The thing to go for is one of those 70,000 soon-to-be-laid-off lurchers. I bought mine after shelling out on totally the wrong breed. Having lost two lots of hens to the same fox, the dog I mistakenly thought would put the frighteners on Basil Brush was an English pointer. I duly bought a beautiful dappled creature straight out of a Stubbs painting. It cost £4100 and came from a lady aromatherapist in Yeovil.
There are no doubt pointers and point
ers, but the one we had never once did what it said on the packet: never pointed, never barked at strangers, never showed any sign that it was in any way good at anything except eating. Last Easter she went around a corner in pursuit of a sheep and promptly had a fatal stroke. She was two. She died as she had lived — an English pointless. We vowed in our grief never to buy another top-of-the-range animal. The fox was one up on us and knew it.
Of course, pet death is nothing new to most households with children. Endless hamsters have escaped under our floorboards never to be seen again. The celebrated arts correspondent Nigel Reynolds once told me that he found the family hamster a full year after it went missing. It turned up in the Christmas decorations box — flat, stiff and ideal for the tree. But you don't expect to have almost everything you own eaten by foxes. When our young cat recently caught feline Aids, it came back from the vet in a body-bag. The vet recommended digging a grave four-feet deep. At about two feet I hit rock, buried the cat anyway and piled a cairn of stones on top. The fox dug it up two days later.
If you don't want to hunt on horseback — and most of us don't — the solution is definitely the lurcher. I know this because I went to see a man who had four of them to get the low-down on the breed. On top of the kennel was a huge pile of rabbits, the result of the morning's walk. He explained that lurchers — in the absence of hares — are brilliant for foxes, and even deer. What's more, he said, they go like smoke and they're so bright you can train them to open your post.
I was sold, We went straight off to the local dogs' home to try to find one. Dogs' homes are reluctant these days to put unwanted dogs down, so inmates can end up being caged for years with ever-decreasing chances of adoption. The dogs on display were the usual motley crew of alsatian crosses with pathetic appeals written up on their kennel doors: 'My name is Barry, and although I have a lovely nature I'm not good with children, old people or other pets.' In other words, 'I'm Barry and I'm as mad as badger in a cake shop and will definitely eat your family.'
But there was one beautiful two-year-old lurcher that no one else had spotted, bearing a tag saying 'castrated dog'. As they say, he chose us. After endless form-filling, a visit from the RSPCA (it is slightly easier in Britain to adopt a child than a dog), plus several home-stay trials, the animal eventually became ours for £70 with jabs and identity microchip. He's very happy and he's been a joy. The only problem is that the fox persecuting us has a homing collar. It is being closely observed either by students from the university or by the natural history unit at the BBC. Take on a fox and you take on the RSPCA, the BBC, New Labour and an army of pressure groups.
The thing with the !Lacher is that there's no override button. It doesn't sniff the fox's bottom, it just kills it. (Don't ask me how, I don't want to know.) One minute he's sniffing the wind, the next he's off. He does 0-30 in about two seconds and can turn on a sixpence. Once locked on to the target you cannot abort the launch. Fortunately our smart dog can distinguish between things he is allowed to chase (squirrels, tomcats, etc.) and those he isn't, such as sheep. The fox around us is looking a lot less smug. In fact, as of the other night he's history. Having not quite made it under the fence in time, the fox has, I assume, gone the same way as our hens, cat, dog and hamsters. I fear he's blipped his last on the radar of life.
I'm not sure that lurchers are the ideal thing for intruders, though. I recently caught a burglar red-handed trying to jemmy a back window with a fork-trowel. Approaching him with the new dog straining at the collar, the man hissed, 'Set that thing on me and I'll stab it.' Our lurcher must have heard this and, keen not to get into a scrap — they're awfully civilised — simply lay down to have his tummy rubbed while the thief did a runner.
We are now looking for a small yappy dog to go that will do the house-guarding — perhaps a surplus terrier — while the lurcher does fox duty. Come to think of it, one of those absurd, Danny La Rue, fluffykneed confections might well be the answer. He could mince about, Cruftsstyle, while the burglar dies laughing.
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