The Last English Poachers (24 page)

Me and my sons have netted hares for the countryside television presenter, Johnny Kingdom, for his programme
Johnny’s New Kingdom.
Johnny was a poacher hisself for a while, as
well as being a lumberjack and a quarryman and a gravedigger, before becoming a television personality. He suffered from depression following an accident on a tractor – then someone gave him
a video camera to take his mind off things and that changed his life. Johnny was a real showman and we got on very well with him. He knew nothing about netting hares, mind, but that’s what he
was with us to learn – and show to the public on his programme. He kept in touch with us for a long time afterwards, but not recently. I reckon he must be getting on a bit in years now and
may be suffering from ill-health. I don’t really know.

We also made two television programmes with photographer Chris Chapman for his
On Assignment
series – one about open coursing and long-netting and the other about poaching and
drag racing. Chris’s pictures is on display in London and New York and he’s won many awards, including Photographer of the Year. I found him to be a very nice bloke altogether –
well spoken and refined, but with a great sense of humour. He came out into the woods taking pictures of us poaching pheasants and came long-netting as well. He was really easy-going and we had a
great laugh with him while we was filming. He also allowed us to use some of his pictures in this book – and on the cover.

Thanks, Chris!

About fifteen years or so ago, I was contacted by one of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s researchers. She said they wanted to make a programme with Hugh going long-netting then cooking a
hare on a barge and having a chat with me. I agreed and arranged with a gamekeeper I knew to do the long-netting, all legal like, on this lord’s estate down in Corsham, Wiltshire. I met the
woman there and she spoke to the gamekeeper, who told her it was alright, but not to bother the lord about it. She had a green light from me and a green light from the gamekeeper, but she still
went and seen the lord. Of course the lord, for his own reasons, didn’t want publicity or no one making television programmes on his land, so the whole thing fell through. The programme got
made, but it was all staged. All you see on the television is fifty yards of long net with a rabbit in it. They didn’t know how to catch a hare and it was all bullshit.

And I never got to meet Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall!

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I make no apologies for my way of life and won’t compromise with townies who frown with the privilege of political correctness on my activities. Country people have moved
to the towns to get work and the majority of people living in the countryside now are town and city people who’ve got no knowledge of animals or the hunting of animals, whether for food or
for sport. People are detached from nature now – nature’s alien to them and they don’t understand it. They’re removed from having to kill to eat; someone else does it for
them, hidden away in abattoirs and factory farms and slaughterhouses. People will eat the meat they buy in a supermarket, but they don’t want to think about it being slaughtered and bled and
gutted, but it is – it’s just not them doing it.

Death’s camouflaged from them and they pretend it don’t exist. But death’s as natural as birth, as natural as eating or sleeping or breathing, but they believe it’s
something to be avoided – unnatural. They’re the ones who’re unnatural. Dishonest. But they’ll be the people who shout loudest against hunting and killing. Then they go
hunting at the supermarket, where their kill is nicely cut and packaged for them. Their lifestyle of work, work, work, to pay for all the stuff they don’t really need don’t allow them
time to come into contact with the real world – the natural world.

But I’m always willing to listen to their point of view.

Bob’s always been mad on greyhounds and he passed his preference for the breed over lurchers, or any other sighthound, down to me. He used to cut notches on the kennels when he was young,
for the amount of hares or rabbits each dog had killed, and I’ve had my own dogs that could match any in the land when it came to hunting and wild coursing. I’ve been a registered dog
trainer for many years now and I’ve run greyhounds on all the tracks around the country, like Nottingham and Reading and other places besides. But a lot of dog tracks are closing down and I
concentrate on the drag coursing and the lamping and the bringing on of dogs from a young age. Greyhounds are elegant dogs and they’ve always been a part of my life – we’ve always
had them and still do. My grandfather had them, my father had them and I have them.

But a greyhound’s only worth keeping if it can be used for hunting and racing. They’re quiet dogs, clean and good-natured, and they’ll run themselves into the ground after a
hare. Like, Bob had a dog once that ran itself to death – it got right up behind this hare, but the animal kept jinking in front of its nose and the dog couldn’t pick it up. It’s
no use trying to call a greyhound off a chase; they just keep on going no matter how you call them. In the end, this dog had to stop because he cramped up. His muscles were hard and solid and he
couldn’t walk. Bob was miles from anywhere, so he started to carry it. After about fifteen minutes, the dog wanted to get down and it was able to stagger about. By the time Bob got back to
his van, the greyhound was a bit better, but completely exhausted and unable to stand for long.

He got the dog home about an hour later and put it in its kennel with a bucket of clean water. It had a drink and Bob gave it two raw eggs and some milk. It lay down on its bed and seemed
contented enough. Bob asked me to look in on it later in the evening and the greyhound was alright. But, in the morning, it was dead. We were both sorry this happened – he was a good dog and
we liked him a lot. Bob did all he could, there was nothing else he could have done – and no use taking him to a vet, because a vet wouldn’t have been able to do anything either, except
charge a fortune for an overnight stay. And the dog would still have been dead in the morning.

As far as I’m concerned, the greatest finder, shifter and killer of ground game is the greyhound. Greyhounds are gentle animals, quiet and polite – until something moves. But
they’re like high-performance athletes once they’re in pursuit and they can get injured easily. I was out once with a dog for a bit of sport – just the greyhound and no gun
– and a hare got up. I slipped the dog and he started off. All of a sudden there was a noise like two stones banging together and he went down in the field. When I caught up to him, I saw
that his front leg was broke in half. I had to go to a nearby farm and get the farmer to come shoot him for me. It was the humane thing to do, rather than let the animal suffer. ’Course,
you’ll always get some people to say otherwise – smug so-called celebrities who think more of their pampered cats and dogs than they do of the poor and pitiful. Running round making
themselves even richer flogging cologne or cosmetics that’s been tested on animals born in laboratories and never seen an open field – and never will. But if we shoot something to eat
because we prefer that to buying it off the supermarket shelves, they’ll send round the
Sunday Slanderer
to pursue us for the full and sordid story and, if it ain’t
incriminating enough, they’ll beat it till it fits their formula.

OK, if you keep dogs, you’re responsible for their well-being. When I get home from being out, either poaching or racing, no matter how wet or cold I am, I always see to the dogs first. I
give them warm food and fresh paper for bedding. I always use paper, it’s warmer and cleaner than straw and straw can house fleas and ticks. To me, the dog’s an essential part of life
and must be cared for – but it ain’t a pet and I never had a dog indoors; they were all kept in kennels and the kennels were cleaned every day and plenty of fresh paper put down for
bedding. Greyhounds have sensitive stomachs and don’t need a lot of rich food – cereal mixed with the meat is usually good for them and chewing bones will keep their teeth clean and
healthy. Exercise on a hard surface keeps their nails short and their toes up taut and not splayed out and their coats are easy to keep clean. Some greyhounds smile – it can give people
who’re not used to them a bit of a start because their teeth show and they look like they’re getting aggressive. I’ve had a few smilers over the years; it’s harmless and can
be a bit of a laugh.

Bob kept a few lurchers once, but not for long. I don’t rate them like I do the greyhound. Some people prefer them, but not me. And things are a lot different now than in the days when we
had dozens of dogs and hundreds of ducks and other fowls about the place. We don’t keep ferrets now, either, but we do keep a good springer spaniel or two. They’re always hard workers
and very gentle in the mouth so’s not to damage the game they retrieve. They pair up well with the greyhounds to flush game for the faster dogs to chase, or I use them to work the hedges and
I shoot whatever comes out and they retrieve it.

Spaniels get very clever and, early in the season, when pheasants have just been released from the pens and they’re still half daft and the blackberry bushes are thick, the birds
can’t get out very quick and a good spaniel will go in and catch a dozen or two. The shooting fraternity calls it ‘pegging’ because a bird caught by a dog like that hasn’t
gone over guns and is classed as a loss. But it’s a good way of poaching – if you got the dog to do it.

I’ve even hunted deer with dogs – greyhounds, that is, up on the Duke of Beaufort’s land. I put the dogs on a deer in daylight – they’re a lot faster than the deer
and they’ll bring down a fallow or a roe the same way as they would a sheep: by the windpipe or the back of the neck. Once the deer’s brought to ground, I’ll run up and cut its
throat and bleed it out. There’s no dog in the world can beat a good greyhound and they’re stronger than they look. I’ve hunted deer with a single dog and with a pack – I
was up in the woods with a tiny little bitch once and she brought down a fair-sized fallow on her own. Even without a gun, it’s great to be out there with a dog or two – darkness
dropping from a star-filled sky and a soft mist washing away all the bitterness and bollocks. You can take your own time on the outskirts of a bustling world, where there’s no stopping for
anything. Loiter outside the mainstream of society with the greyhound stepping into your stride beside you. Man and dog. Together.

Like I think I said already, I’m licensed for training dogs with the Greyhound Board of Great Britain now, so I don’t shoot them any more, unless one breaks its leg or something down
the fields and it’s the most humane thing to do, like as happened that time I told you about when the farmer shot my injured dog. I became a licensed trainer in the late 1990s, attached to
Reading Greyhound Stadium, which closed down in 2008. I was successful there and I had a very good strike rate and percentage of wins for a trainer. Now I operate as unattached, not with any track,
but running my dogs anywhere I like. The thing is, greyhound tracks are closing down all the time because they’re becoming increasingly less profitable and the land they’re on’s
worth more being put to other uses – like supermarkets or second-hand clothes shops. But to me greyhound racing’s a good sport, in the absence of anything else. Let me put it this way,
I love to see a good dog after a good hare and that’s my first love – out across the fields and the greyhound pitting its wits against the hare and the hare outwitting the dog most
times – or even the catching of one every now and again to eat. Then there was competition coursing, which was run by a clique of cheats and the chosen few and, after that, there’s
track racing, where the ordinary man will get a fairer shake.

But not always.

For instance, if your dog’s a bang railer – which means he likes to run on the rail round the track – then he should be drawn in an inside trap. Other dogs are wide runners and
should be in the outside traps. A ‘grader’ is someone who sits in an office and grades the dogs, knows all the dogs and how they prefer to run. But bookies don’t like people
winning, because they lose money. They’ll complain to the racing manager if someone’s having it off them too many times. That’s when graders can be influenced to put railers in
outside traps and vice versa – a dog will come across the others at full speed and greyhounds get injured that way. Another dangerous aspect is the shape of the tracks, with tight bends
either end of long straights. But most tracks are located in inner cities where land is valuable and it would cost too much to realign the bends and make them nice and sweeping – they’d
be much better as straight runs, like our drag track, but that’s not going to happen.

As well as that, in summer the sand on the track can get dry and very loose. Groundsmen water it to try to keep it firm and what you get is a certain depth of firm sand, with loose sand
underneath. A dog’s running and its paws are digging in for purchase – his foot goes through the firm sand and into the loose sand and he slips and breaks a hock. The tracks need
watering right down, but this don’t get done because of laziness or carelessness due to people being paid a minimum wage to do the job and their hearts ain’t really in it. I don’t
call it cruelty; I call it a preoccupation with profit over outlay and the welfare of the dogs. No one wants to see a greyhound getting hurt and it could be avoided if the money was there. But
there’s less and less investment in track racing and, eventually, I can see it dying out altogether through lack of interest by future generations.

At one time there were thousands of dogs about and they weren’t kept track of like they are now and, over the years, before I was a trainer, I must have shot close on a thousand of them.
And I know you’ll ask, how can anyone who thinks so highly of his hounds do something like that? You see, some greyhound trainers are no good and they blame the dogs – but it’s
them who ain’t up to scratch, not the greyhounds. Dozens of these dogs used to come over from Ireland and what they were running on was the kill of a live hare. Running round a track,
they’re not getting a kill, so they lose interest. All they’re doing is running with the other dogs and not fulfilling their potential. So the trainers would ring me up: