Shooting Times & Country Magazine
SELF-HUNTING MENACE
Owners really should take responsibility for their dogs
During lockdown, it’s been my habit to take my exercise by walking down to the fen with Emma. It’s a stroll of about a kilometre, undertaken on a public footpath from which I am more likely to encounter a grey partridge than another person.
The fen is about 40 acres and is mainly reed bed fringed with alders and poplars. It’s a fragment of the extensive valley fens that once separated Suffolk from Norfolk. Once the river engineers and drainers got to work, most of the fens disappeared, leaving just a few survivors.
I take my Walkstool with me, a sturdy, Swedish-made folding seat, so I can sit and enjoy the sights and sounds of the fen. It is both a nature reserve and a Site to be tackled. However, I’ve done most of my picking-up in arable East Anglia, where fences are few and a dog can pick-up from September to January without ever needing to jump anything. Incidentally, foxhunting in Essex and Suffolk is the same —
I’ve hunted a whole season without jumping anything more formidable than an open ditch.
Barbed obstacles
There’s one very good reason not to teach your dog to jump and that’s barbed wire. Some handlers will cheerfully send their dogs over barbed wire, and individual dogs of Special Scientific Interest, managed as much for its botanical as its ornithological interest. According to the noticeboard, it has breeding nightingales but they disappeared some years ago, their habitat browsed out by muntjac.
Though the nightingales may have gone, it has a good variety of breeding birds, including reed and sedge warblers. It’s a great place to listen to cuckoos or, at this time of the year, to watch hobbies hawking for dragonflies. Most visits at dusk produce sightings of barn owls, while I have got to know a young roebuck that is leading a solitary life there.
A few days ago, I was sitting on my stool, enjoying the peace, when a black cocker spaniel burst into the fen, yapping determinedly before galloping from view into the reed bed. A few minutes later a young man, presumably the cocker’s owner, came wandering along the footpath. I asked him if he had lost his dog, but he couldn’t hear me as he had headphones on. Ah, yes, he said, become impressively accomplished at coping with one of the most dangerous obstacles to be found in the shooting field. However, a taut barbed-wire fence is one thing, while a saggy strand is another. If you have ever seen a dog caught up in barbed wire, you will think twice before sending your dog over it.
My two-year-old sprocker is an athletic dog and I’ve no doubt that, given the right encouragement, she would be a good jumper. However, I haven’t encouraged her to jump and she hasn’t shown any inclination to do so. I’m not encouraging her because my new house has a half-acre garden, having unblocked his ears, it was his dog. He wasn’t bothered by its absence, as it would catch him up eventually.
Three minutes later, it came galloping back past me, heading along the path after its master. Clearly, this dog was a self-hunter whose owner couldn’t care less what it got up to. Dogs like this are a menace to the countryside, causing havoc to wildlife, but it’s not the dog’s fault — it’s the thoughtless owner who is to blame. securely fenced on three sides, but with a low wall to the front. Emma could jump it easily if she wanted to, but in the five months she has lived here she hasn’t made any attempt.
The wall separates my garden from that of my neighbour, so there’s not the risk of a busy road the other side, but I’m pleased she is happy to remain on my property.
Water ways
Jumping into water is another risky procedure that some dogs delight in. Again, it looks spectacular, and a dog that launches itself into water in such a fashion never fails to impress. But it is risky, with the danger of unseen, submerged hazards that the dog can crash into or even impale itself on. It’s much better to have a dog that enters water more slowly than one that goes in with a big splash. Such dogs might not win trials but they’re more likely to carry on working to an advanced age.
Age is something that eventually stops even the keenest jumpers. You may not notice at first, but then you realise that it was a season or two ago since your dog last performed those spectacular leaps. Come to think about it, I was a good high-jumper in my youth but it’s a long time since I jumped anything.
On the first Saturday of May, the bulk of the heavier traffic on the A1 was moving south, loaded to the gunwales with favour-decked supporters of Leicester City football team speeding to join a madding crowd packed cheek by jowl around the Wembley greensward.
Four of us headed north for more peaceful lawns. Our goal was the Peakirk Waterfowl Gardens, on the northern side of Peterborough, 11 acres of wildfowl sanctuary, where artist fowler Noel Dudley looks after 550 duck, geese and swans for the Wildfowl Trust.
Five years ago this site was a withy bed and council tip. Today the only link with its ugly past is the occasional piece of perambulator that may come to light in the course of pond clearance. In the place of rubbish, tangled acres of bramble and the withies, terraced streams, linking a succession of ponds, glide slowly between close-trimmed lawns and banks. On them shrubs and nettly long grass combine to relieve the tidiness and, at the same time, provide nesting cover for the fowl that live within the surrounding wire fence.
Close to the road on two sides, the sanctuary needs a wire fence to keep