We were in the habit of parking up at the Stone most nights that winter. Sitting in the car. It’s a windy spot up there. Often we shared a bottle, and watched the moon or maybe the constellation my youngest used to call O’Brian moving across the sky above the Valley. Usually we had it to ourselves, talking quietly. The sorts of things couples talk about in bed on a Sunday morning maybe, but illuminated by the supernal view and the vague sense that the Stone is in some way a sacred place.
Every night that winter a quad bike would pass along the lane. Two young men riding, one with a powerful torch, one with a gun. Lamping. The idea is to cruise around the fields and use the torch until you spot the reflective retinas of an animal shining. Dazzled by the light it will freeze, and then you keep the lamp focussed on the eyes until you are close enough to kill it.
The rules are that you should be able to identify the animal before you shoot. I think these rules were written after someone in Somerset shot his nephew. Understandable really. (The rule – not shooting the nephew). But for the average lamper, there really is no need for identification. Everything is fair game. If it’s a rabbit or a hare, it’s for the pot. If it’s a badger, better still. Badgers are a protected species, of course, but farmers and the government have failed to get a grip on the epidemic of TB in cattle, and so badgers are blamed. The government continues to cull them on the basis of some very dubious science, and if that’s OK for the government it’s fine by farmers too, and quiet conspiracies to get rid of badgers are common. I’ve heard the covert conversations while sitting in farm kitchens.
Fallow deer come out of the woods at night round here too. If I was a lamper I’d shoot them, I suppose. Then there are the sheep. There’d be hell to pay if they shot a sheep.
That leaves foxes, the real target. Foxes are the nearest thing in our sad countryside to an apex predator, though the main prey species that they pull down are rats and mice. They are thought by farmers to kill lambs. These days all lambs are born in special lambing sheds, paid for by the EU. I know about these – I used to work on their construction. By the time the lambs and their mothers leave the sheds there’s not much risk of their being eaten by foxes. In the days when lambs were born outdoors the ones eaten were probably stillborn anyway, but the foxes and the ravens always got the blame. So farmers like to have the foxes shot, and the boys on the bike like killing things. All good in the general country estimation. Every night the lampers went in and out of all the fields. All the farmers, it seemed, approved. It’s a rural regime with nothing to stop the extermination of foxes except for their versatility and their cunning habit of moving into town.
There are actually very few farmers in this country, but just as they can quietly work towards eliminating our largest carnivorous predator, there is not much to stop them impoverishing our countryside in any other way that lines their pockets. Almost all the wildlife I knew as a boy is quietly vanishing while the countryside looks almost as beautiful as ever, and just as pleasing to the visitor. It isn’t just the foxes that are going. Everything else is being quietly starved or poisoned by our farming methods. Go out for a walk today and you will be lucky to see any birds other than pigeons, blackbirds, crows and magpies. Maybe a few bluetits.
.Most of us would agree that the countryside belongs, in some sense, to all of us, and to future generations. Farming is quietly moving towards extracting more money from the countryside and removing and tidying the areas that give a little space for nature. Many of us realise that this gross simplification of what is allowed to exist in our countryside is not sustainable, let alone morally justifiable, and that we need complex biodiversity for our own survival as well as for the survival of the planet. This cannot easily happen if our system of land ownership is allowed to continue to empower a few farmers to treat our countryside and the natural world as if they owned it. The right to make money out of the countryside conferred by land ownership should not confer the right to degrade its ecosystems. All across Europe from Sweden to Spain people are negotiating ways of co-existing with wildlife, encouraging recent increases in populations of bison, lynx, wolves, wolverines and bears. Here most of our beavers are in enclosures, and most of our foxes are fair game.