Give and take
At the beating heart of the rural idyll is exercise of the power over life and death.
Ihave shot my first rabbit. And I feel bloody awful about it. I knew I would. For most of the year and a half we’ve been on our patch of the Wairarapa, I’ve been fretting about my responsibility to keep down the rabbit population, and alternately dreading the actual business of keeping down the rabbit population. It is, I hardly need say, a hell of a thing to kill another living, breathing thing.
Last spring, at no small expense, I bought an air rifle so that I might have no excuse not to do what had to be done. Rabbits are pests, after all.
Fortunately, the cat, which in the city seldom stirred herself to do more than roll over and demand more peeled grapes, came to my rescue. For much of our first spring, a series of small, fluffy corpses – brains mysteriously missing – appeared around the property. Naturally, we suspected zombies. But it was actually our fat little cat, which, I fancy, surprised even herself with the alacrity with which she’d taken to country life. And to being a zombie.
This spring, as wet and miserable as the last bit of it was, and despite the cat’s killing spree last year, there has been a noticeable swelling of the rabbit population around our place. And not only at our place, but also in the district, according to the sagacious Miles the sheep farmer.
Something had to be done. So, obviously I had a chat with the cat. She yawned, but claimed she had things in hand. Well, she’s lost her touch, or she’d rather be eating peeled grapes, because just two small brainless corpses have been sighted this year.
Which is rather fewer – many fewer – than the number of rabbits that appear to be living in our garden and treating our lawns and paddocks as a great place to dine.
I’ve spotted them from various windows when I’ve been writing in our home office, ironing in the spare room, lying in bed and while sitting on the loo. As I say, something had to be done.
I’ll spare you the details of the awful business of dispatching the first of them. I will say that it was, thank goodness, over quickly; my feeling of regret took longer to dissipate. And the regret has now been replaced by growing confusion over my changing relationship with animals since we’ve moved to the country.
Ifeel closer and more protective of animals now than I have ever done, and not just fat little cats. Rural life offers intimacy with many different kinds of creatures, not just sheep and cattle, but, so far for me, with the pesky rabbits, pigs, working dogs, the beautiful golden hare that lives somewhere on the property, Californian quail, native birds, and even a few turtle doves and wild rosellas.
Raising our lambs Xanthe – which is likely to be the greatest sheep that’s ever lived – Elizabeth Jane and little Shirley Valentine (we took her in when she was ill; she is recovering nicely) has opened my mind to how gentle, playful and individual these animals are. A paddock of sheep is not a paddock of sheep, it’s a field full of individuals. We haven’t cooked lamb since Xanthe arrived.
The evil chooks are the same: each is evil in her own wonderful way. Each has a distinctive personality. Yet, and this is the confusing bit, I’m still happily eating supermarket chicken, although free range.
Are our lambs more important or more loved than our chooks? I don’t think so, though the lambs are considerably less evil. Yet there seems to be an odd and perplexing dissonance in my mind, one allowing me to cheerfully devour a relative of the demonic chooks, yet one making me shrink from eating lamb.
The dissonance means that I sat in the rain comforting Shirley Valentine after finding her sick and shivering and afraid, and then helped her get better, but I could also draw a bead on a cute, grey rabbit in my backyard and pull the trigger.
One of those necessary actions made me feel good, the other rather sad. Together, they confound me. I don’t know what is to be done.
A series of small, fluffy corpses – brains missing – appeared. Naturally, we suspected zombies.