Vermin Shooting It is some time since I last saw
a gamekeeper's 'larder.' There are fewer keepers and fewer garlic preserves where vermin are killed and strung up, but, in the days when such things were common, the owners of shooting estates could only judge the keeper's diligence by the evidence of the mortuary. Large numbers of stoats, weasels, jays, hawks and crows that decomposed and advertised themselves by pol- luting the air in the vicinity were a sign that a keeper was doing his job. His employment often depended on the evidence of his kills. Farmers who destroy vermin in their fields some- times hang the dead creatures on a fence or fasten a crow to a stick in the hope that it will be taken as a warning, but a fluttering crow-corpse never seems to have much impression on the living birds, and I am sure a jay is far too confident and too knowing to be disturbed at the sight of a dead relative.
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