Murder most fowl

A friend recently took to her Facebook page in grief stricken exasperation having lost several chickens to the local fox, and announced her intention to go out with her gun, find the fox, and “blast the bastard”.

For anyone who has ever kept, or even just lived with hens as I have, I understood completely the shock and heartbreak. I remember well waking up to the sight of feathers everywhere, and knowing that one of the girls I considered something of a pal, who’d roosted on my back doorstep, and followed me around, clucking and chatting, had met with a horrible and violent end.

I remember the sadness and the pain that I would never see her again. The war-cry for ‘revenge’ on the fox which had carried her off however, and as expressed by my friend on her page, was not something to which I could relate.

The fox was just… being a fox. Living in the country, one expects such heartbreak. It goes with the territory. If you can’t hack it, don’t keep poultry, or move to the city. It’s part of country life.

So, some would claim, is hunting.

I disagree.

Being a “part of country life” is just one of the various ‘reasons’ that those who mount horses and take to the fields to hunt down and destroy foxes with packs of baying hounds often give for their activity - an activity that is condemned by three quarters of the British population, not just in urban, but in rural areas too, as blood-lusting, barbaric, base, unworthy, anachronistic, and unnecessary.

The overriding reason would seem to be a wish for towering and theatrical revenge on a species of wildlife that occasionally robs humans - and their stomachs - of their omelettes and their Sunday roasts.

The rest really is just a load of old flannel, and I would have a lot more respect for a great many who indulge in this viciousness if they would simply admit they just love a good gallop across the English countryside with a nice brutal murder at the end of it.

But still the specious excuses bubble out, like effluence from a sewer pipe.

Foxes kill for fun! Hunt supporters claim. They are a blight that must be purged from the land.

How do they know? Do they speak fox? Have they asked a fox what it gets out of decimating a hen house, yet apparently carrying off only one chicken?

The answer would appear to be that humans simply don’t give them time to finish the job.

Evidence suggests that if such ‘crime’ scenes were to be left undisturbed, the fox would be back to take all the poultry killed to store underground as carrion, but as soon as humans discover the scene, they batten down the hatches, remove the dead fowl to their own freezers (oh well, we were going to eat them sooner or later), and shriek that foxes are psychopaths who go mad killing everything in sight like ASBOs out for Saturday night kicks. Inform the Hunt immediately – that bastard fox has run off with our dinner!

Hunting is the best and most humane way, they claim. They don’t suffer. It’s quick. Hounds are efficient. It’s not cruel.

Again, have they asked a fox? Are they foxes? How do they know they don’t suffer?

Vets who have examined the corpses of foxes killed by packs of hounds tend also to demur on this. Post-mortem studies published by veterinarians report evidence of muscle and tissue damage, blood loss and other injuries indicative of prolonged, painful, and traumatic deaths.

But foxes kill lambs too, say hunters. They have to go!

So do domestic dogs off the lead of course, but foxes are the ‘pest’. They’re ‘vermin’.

And why do we raise sheep and their lambs? For their wool, and again, so we can eat them.

Once more, it comes down to humans, and their sense of entitlement to use other species for their own ends in whatever way they wish. For food. For clothing. For lanolin. For whatever.

So what of badgers? Why do they have to die? Surely we don’t eat them?

No, but they give cows tuberculosis!

Even though the connection between bovine TB and badgers still hasn’t actually been proven conclusively, it’s still good enough for most people. We have to save the cows. Farmers will die / be forced to find alternative ways to earn a living if we don’t!  

People need cows. People rely on cattle for… food, and butter, and milk for their cornflakes. They need their bones to make jelly and gummy sweeties shaped like stars and fried eggs, and they need their skin for shoes and belts and jackets and car seat covers and bags...

Ok, so what crime have stags committed? Well, they’ve sired too many young, and there are too many deer. It’s bad for the environment. They eat saplings and destroy tree bark. And why are there too many deer? Because they were overbred for ‘sport’ in the 19^th century, and have no natural predators. And why have they no natural predators? Because humans have hunted their predators to extinction because humans felt threatened by them… and wanted their pelts for rugs and coats for themselves.

And what of hares? Why are they hunted with hounds? What have they done?

Well, they run fast, and it’s fun to see if a dog can catch up with one…

Ahhh….there we have it at last.  

Fun.

As a young, fit, masochistic undercover anti of 23, with a pair of stout boots, a wax-jacket, and a ‘posh’ voice, I blended sufficiently to be in a position to follow a Beagle hunt back in the day. I felt I needed to see for myself. To back-up my anti-hunting stance with experience. I wanted to be able to speak from strength next time a hunt supporter attempted to justify themselves to me.

The antis were out in force, and I felt the weight of their hate.

“Oh just look at them…” observed my companions in disgust. “Fucking hippies.”

I said nothing. Nothing, that is, until I saw the hare tear out of the woodland pursued by some 40 hounds. Tears sprang into my eyes as I willed it to get away. I prayed to the old gods, fists clenched as, unable to take the sight in silence any longer, I screamed: “Run, little brother, run!”

I remember the look of astonishment on the faces of the antis, then seeing their grins as the hare got away.

I punched the air, and yelled: “YES!”

The antis and I exchanged looks and discreet thumbs-ups. They realised what I had been up to.

So did my companions, but then they knew me to be a bit of a looney. All the best families have at least one. They were more concerned with the fact that they needed to get drunk as soon as possible, as it had not been a “good day” – and it had apparently not been a “good day” because there had not been a kill.

I needed conduct no further research. I had all I required to arrive at my considered conclusion about hunting.

Pest control?

Bollocks. It was all about the kill.

It still is. I have seen nothing over the intervening 28 years to alter this conclusion, and if someone’s idea of ‘fun’ is to run an animal into exhaustion and see it torn limb from limb, they should be in therapy in a secure institution, not splashed on the covers of sycophantic newspapers up and down the country, enjoying a laugh and a stirrup cup before indulging their sickness.

Another conclusion I have reached is that if humans were to leave the natural world to manage itself, balance would probably be restored pretty quickly.

Thanks for sorting out the rats, Reynard...

Far from being ‘vermin’ or a ‘pest’, foxes are in fact, very efficient dustmen. No need to throw food into the recycling, leave it for the fox. When a pigeon flew into the plate glass window at my last employment, it was me, the wishy-washy veggie hippy, who placed its body in my car to take to a friend’s for their local fox family. The meat-eaters with whom I worked couldn’t even bear to touch it (humans have an amazing facility for disconnect when it suits us).

As for urban foxes, I was only too glad of their help when living on a rat-infested London street. The rubbish left strewn around on the pavement thanks to the fried chicken joint just beyond the railway bridge in the middle of my road brought the foxes, and they dealt with the rats – some of which were ‘super rats’ the size of Chihuahuas.

None of the above would have been an issue had it not been for humans and their disgusting habits, and their entitled belief that someone somewhere, will always clean up their mess.

In a great many instances, that someone is the fox, and when they’re gone, we can congratulate ourselves on a job well done as we suffocate in our own filth.

KEEP THE BAN.

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2015

Through thick and thin

2015 - Selfies in the loo.. because that's what people do...

It was a passport booth picture that did it. That finally pushed me into action. I was 49, sliding into 50, and peri-menopausal. I looked old, and tired, and fat.

I won’t avoid the word. I was indeed, fat. Some 4 stone overweight.

I knew exactly how I had piled it all on. 15 years previously, my mother had died of a brain tumour, and my brother and I had to orchestrate the despatch of our family life onto a council lorry to be taken to some squalid warehouse for carrion house clearers to pick through what they might be able to flog, and what would go to the tip. Neither he nor I could afford to stay in the only family home we’d ever known. Having had to stomach over 30 years of a sitting tenant’s ‘peppercorn’ rent from our mother, if we wanted to carrying on living there, they would have market rent from us. 

So we watched it all go down the bog and went back to our one-room studio rentals. His, in West London. Mine in Homerton.

Grief hits differently every time. When my father had dropped dead in the street some 8 years previously, I had simply stopped eating. When my mother died, I spent the next 12 months sitting on my sofa, drinking red wine, and eating Toblerone and pizza after pizza. Anything to fill the ineffable pit of nothingness in my middle.  

I had never been what anyone might call ‘delicate’. I took after the sturdy side of the family. As a family friend had once thoughtfully observed (out loud, naturally): “the Wyndham women are beautiful, but they all turn into little Welsh pit ponies.” My own brother referred to the propensity for the women of our family to become overweight and “box shaped” in middle age as “the Wyndham curse”.

Indeed, I could not remember a time in my life when someone didn’t have something to say about my body. When I was ten years old, a reporter from the Radio Times came to interview me about how I had approached playing the role of ‘Heidi’ in the BBC television series of the same name in 1974. I remember I had liked him, enjoyed talking to him. I had chatted freely in what was my trademark chirpy way about my cat, my school, my love of horses, and how I had liked the character of Heidi as she wasn’t a “goody-goody.”

When the article was published, he used the first paragraph to describe me physically for the readers. I was apparently “a powerful little girl… verging on tubby.”

"Verging on tubby"... At 10 years old. With the whippet that was Nicholas Lyndhurst aged 13

When I got to Secondary School, the boys would taunt me for my “horse-rider’s arse”, which started me on a lifelong quest for shirts, tunics, and jumpers that would cover it. A quest, and look, which would last until I was 50 years of age. I would envy girls who could wear jackets that didn’t cover everything down to their mid-thighs. I would stare in wonder at others who didn’t seem to care about the size of their bums and would wear whatever they liked. I would wear ‘boyfriend’ jumpers or A-line skirts with boots – so convinced was I that I had ugly ‘bottle legs’ – or at least, as I had been told that I had...

I was full-blown anorexic between the ages of 13 and 17. I existed on one Greek yoghurt and an apple a day, pretending to my mother I had eaten breakfast by making toast so the kitchen smelled of it, then scraping crumbs onto a plate, smearing a butter knife with jam, and then throwing the toast to the pigeons when I left the house and ran for the bus.

I was 18 and 9 stone when a music manager took an interest in me. My singing voice was pretty impressive for a teenager. I could belt out blues, opera, soul, and folk with equal authority, and I was regularly guesting with bands, making an impact.

The manager wanted to take me on. She thought she could make me a star. She wanted to take me to L.A. to introduce me to some record producers.

“Can you get down to under 8 stone in the next few weeks, though?” She asked.

I was already living on fuck-all.

My mother stepped in. “You’re not going to L.A.” she said. She feared a ‘fate worse than death’. I was naïve, I would be eaten alive. She was probably right. I didn’t go.

By the time I met my first serious boyfriend, I was about 10 stone, and a plush size 12-14. He was a chubby lad himself, but we went on a diet together, and I went down to a size 10, whilst he went happily to his tailor in Savile Row to order several new suits.

When (at my instigation) we broke up, his parting shot to me was “please don’t put any weight back on.”

Stuffing myself with a glass of wine in the South of France - aged 24

Why it should make any difference to a man who was unlikely ever to see me again remains a mystery to this day, but he still felt it was incumbent on him to try to obtain a promise from me not to slip back into my lardy ways. For the overall good of mankind presumably.

It didn’t work. 15 years later, and I am a size 16, and being told by my next ‘serious’ boyfriend (note the lack of relationships in between) that not only am I the ‘oldest’ woman he’s ever been out with (I was 39 to his 43), I am also the ‘fattest’.

Working as a Jazz singer at the time, one gigantic saxophonist bandleader booked me often to be the canary for his gigs. He thought I was a fantastic singer. In spite of the fact that he himself was about 12 times my size, he still insisted on calling me “big momma”.

"It's not over 'til the fat lady sings..." - 'Big Momma' at the Oxford Jazz Festival - 2009 (Pic: Barker Evans)

When exchanging pleasantries and asking after the family of the Paraguayan cleaner at my next job, I was told in response, and right out of left field, that I was “gorda” (it means ‘fat’ in Spanish), I decided to take some time away from life and hide in the Spanish mountains.

Coming home to England, I settled for a while in Oxfordshire, where, still a whopping size 16, I was used as debris dam material to aid the Flood Alleviation scheme*, before being made redundant and moving to the New Forest.

That’s where the fun really started. New friends, strangely all male, felt it their bounden duty to keep me updated as to the state of my walloping unattractiveness and comedy value at all opportunities.

At an envelope stuffing party for an organisation to which I belong, and indeed, for which I sit on council, we all raced through the task in record time, but…

“It’s not over until the fat lady sings” chirped one of the officers. “Give us a song, Emma.”

I went quietly outside into the car park and sobbed.  

Somehow, in amongst all this slobbing about being fat all over the place and providing such Class-A merriment and diversion for everyone who believes that overweight people a) don’t have any feelings, b) exist simply for their entertainment, and c) are completely unaware that they are overweight and need to be told – often; I have been an actor, a voice teacher, a Journalist, a Jazz singer and even an Executive PA, and Office Manager – working in some pretty prestigious places and believing I was making a contribution.

'Gargantua' at Sotheby's aged 27 and a size 14 - cataloguing the Vivien Leigh Collection prior to sale in New York. That's her Oscar for 'Gone with the Wind' I am holding like a holy relic...

However, it wasn’t until I went to work for an IT company and shared an office with another heifer – a breathtakingly beautiful woman with such low self-esteem it was hard to imagine how she managed to get out of bed in the morning - that the whole thing switched. My darling colleague, who was also my line-manager, announced that she was so utterly sick of herself, that she was going to go on one of those very low calorie ketosis-inducing meal replacement diets. Having just come back from the photo booth and been horrified by my own likeness for a passport picture, I decided to join her to see what would happen, and to give her some moral support. If we were both doing it, we could encourage each other.

The long and the short of it is that I dumped over 5 stone in a year. Furthermore, I have kept it off.

Now of course, I am being told I am too thin.

I am ‘fragile’ looking. A tiny size 8. My hip and collar bones protrude. People are worried.

“You’ve gone too far.”

“Do you actually eat anything?”

I want to scream: “rearrange this well-known phrase containing the words 'off' and 'fuck'..."I am so angry, it actually sometimes makes it hard for me to eat. Especially when one of those now expressing ‘concern’ for my new found fragility is the same guy who made me cry at the envelope stuffing party.

So what have I learned? Maybe that if you’re female, the world always seems to have something to say about what size you are, what shape you are, and what your bloody hair is doing in a way that men never seem to have to deal with – which is perhaps why they seem to be the ones who dish up the most in the way of running commentary.

Why is this? Maybe because thanks to the non-stop drip drip drip of our facile media, they’ve been given the impression that most women strive to be attractive and acceptable to them. They must feel somehow bound to let us know if we’re passing muster or not - to help us attain goal - that being their sexual interest - even if we haven’t asked for their opinion, and wouldn’t micturate on these bouncers at the gates of life if they were combusting in the street.

As Erin McKean said: “You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.”

And as I say: "My body. My business."

Mind your own.

© Emmeline Wyndham - 2015

* Sorry, got a bit carried away there. I was in fact, the Events Coordinator for the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University. I still had big ear-lobes apparently – according to one Don...