Rich the Fox, at work

We’ve been eating Danny for weeks, and I must say that he is delicious…

Danny is a bull that used to belong to a neighbor. He got aggressive (Danny, not the neighbor) and attacked a prize show bull. So the neighbor called Rich in to shoot Danny, and we got half of him as a result. He’s in the freezer now, wrapped in plastic and neatly labelled, and if you cook him slowly all day, he makes the most melting beef stew with dumplings…

Around here, Rich is called “Rich the Fox.” He is the local sharp shooter - whenever someone has a fox taking their chickens or geese, an aggressive animal on the loose or a horse that needs putting down, they’ll call up Rich. He loads up his rifle and away he goes…

The other night, Rich got a call that some fox had been sighted in a freshly-baled hay field, and the owner of the fields asked him to come and take care of them. Rich asked if Joli and I wanted to go along.

I was torn. On the one hand, even as a recovering city girl, I understand that there is a certain practical reality to living on a farm. Foxes are pests that eat valuable stock, and they have to be culled.

On the other hand, I loathe guns, and violence of any sort. Coming from America, where firearms are not restricted in any way, and maniacs roam fully armed, I get a quick thrill of horror whenever I see Rich’s shot gun out on the table as he gets ready for a shoot.

Ready for a shoot

And then there was the question of Joli. At nine, did I really want her to get inured to shooting and killing animals? Is it simply part of the pragmatic farm life style, where you accept that animals get killed…and eaten…or is it a dangerous de-sensitization process, from which a child should be shielded?

I wasn’t sure. Elly, who is now sixteen, used to love going with Rich out on his shooting trips, and it didn’t seem to have harmed her. And then again, an interesting thing has happened to Joli lately. She has always adored animals, and at the age of six, came home and announced that she was a vegetarian, because “it was wrong to eat animals.”

I’ve never been a vegetarian myself. Although it’s a bit intellectually dishonest of me - if I was stranded in a field with a cow, it would be a long cold day before I killed the cow and ate it. I’d probably eat grass instead. But I’m quite happy to enjoy a steak if someone else will do the dirty work for me, and serve it medium, cooked so that no blood shows, with chips on the side…. So I’m aware that my own attitudes on the matter are less than pure.

A Lesson in the Field

I respected Joli’s decision to be a vegetarian, and she stuck by it for three years - until we came to live here, on the farm. Because we raise and eat our own sheep, I was curious as to how it would affect Joli. Would she be even more horrified, having helped at the birth of the lambs and watched them grow, to see us eating sheep that she knew?

Curiously, it affected her the other way around. Seeing the sheep raised and understanding what a lovely, peaceful life they had, one day she walked into the kitchen and said, “Mum, I’m going to eat meat. I know those sheep haven’t suffered, and I think it’s OK.”

Dealing with the reality of raising and eating your own livestock had taken away her pangs of conscience - something I never expected. But how would it impact her, seeing a wild animal hunted and killed? For that matter, how would it affect me? I had never actually seen anything killed before, except a dog that was put down by the vet - and this coming year, when slaughter time come around, I plan to be far, away from the kitchen table which will reportedly be heaped with fresh lamb carcasses…

Another factor is that Joli has also been reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series, by Jean Auel, and she’s become entranced by all things Stone Age. She’s been sewing leather bags, drying herb and grinding things with her mortar and pestle - and she wanted to have a go at skinning and curing a hide. So she begged to be allowed to go on the hunt.

With reservations, I climbed into the Land Rover with the two keen hunters and we set off…

The field was dark and dotted with huge, round bales of hay. Rich spotted a double gleam of yellow in the distance and pointed it out to us - a fox. He shot once, twice and the gleam went out. That was all there was to it.

He repeated the exercise, and got another fox. It was so far away that I couldn’t really hear or see anything upsetting. And although I wasn’t sure how I felt about the gun part, I must admit that it was very exciting to watch him shoot, in the way that it is compelling to watch anyone do something that they do extremely well.

Then we came up on the foxes. Rich knelt down by them and showed Joli the entry and exit points, and the way that the bullet explodes inside on impact. I stayed well back, but she seemed curious and interested and not squeamish at all. She wants to be a vet, and has always had a strong stomach…Which she proved again when it was time to pick up the foxes and carry them back to the Land Rover…

We took one fox home with us, wrapped in a plastic sack, but left one on the gate for the land owner to find. “What did you tie it up with?” I asked Rich when he got back into the Land Rover. “I threaded one foot through the other one,” he said. “Oh,” I said, and wished I hadn’t asked…

I never did work out how I felt about the whole thing. Hunting and shooting and killing animals was alien to me, and is still alien. Going along on a hunt hasn’t made me part of the process, although I suppose it is all a bit more familiar than it was before. I did have a certain remote interest in the dead foxes - and wasn’t at all as horrified as I thought I would be.

But then, I thought I would struggle to eat lambs that I had watched grow up - and much to the contrary, I found myself looking at a particularly fat-haunched specimen the other day and thinking, “Yum!” Definitely a first for me…

When I asked Joli how she ended up feeling about it, she was thoughtful. “in a way, it was fun, but then I thought, ‘Oh, they’re dead,’ ” she said. “I felt…not exactly guilty, but like I shouldn’t have done that, because we’re not going to eat them. It felt like killing for no reason.”

Even considering the fact that foxes kill chickens, which we do eat?

Not good enough, she said. It just wasn’t the same. “I would like to learn to shoot, but maybe not foxes. I could shoot rabbits - because then we could eat them.”

As long as she finds someone else to cook them!