One of the sculptures at the British Museum’s splendid Pompeii exhibition shows four ferocious dogs attacking a stag as it awaits its bloody death with quiet resignation. It is a beautiful work of art, brilliantly carved from a single slab of marble, but potentially shocking today because it appears to rejoice at the prospect of the stag being torn to pieces. The museum clearly fears so, for the label beside the sculpture anticipates objections to it by explaining that the ancient Romans, unlike us, were very keen on bloodsports. This enthusiasm, together with an obsession with erect penises, is one of the few ways in which the Romans were not our superiors in delicacy and refinement.
Hunting with hounds has, of course, been abolished in England by parliament, but fox-hunting has become rather more popular as a result. I don’t know about deer-hunting. Most people, I suspect, feel much greater revulsion at the idea of a deer being savaged by dogs than of a fox suffering the same fate. I do. I wouldn’t even want the charmless little muntjacs that roam my land, killing young trees by stripping them of their bark, to meet their end in this way. But I would be strongly in favour of a ‘cull’, that euphemism for a massacre by gunfire.
But foxes? That is another story. I really hate foxes, and I don’t mind how they die. I have never had the smallest desire to go hunting; but since they bite off chickens’ heads just for the fun of it, I don’t see why other people shouldn’t kill them for fun if they want to as well. Killing foxes is accepted as sometimes necessary even in our squeamish modern society: it is doing so for pleasure that is thought unacceptable. This makes little sense when it is considered perfectly all right to enjoy killing fish, when no fish has ever done anyone any harm. Furthermore, such is my dislike of foxes that it arouses in me a truly Roman bloodlust.
There is, of course, a reason for this. A couple of months ago I was rejoicing in the fact that all of my eight chickens had survived the great winter freeze when I assumed that foxes would have been hungry and on the prowl. I even imagined that perhaps there weren’t any foxes around. But I was completely wrong. As soon as the first signs of spring appeared, my chickens began disappearing one by one. There wasn’t a wholesale massacre of the kind some of my neighbours have experienced. There weren’t even any feathers around as evidence of a death. It was just that almost every evening, when I shut the chickens up for the night, one of them was missing, never to reappear.
I would then rush off at once to the poultry centre in Towcester to replace the lost chicken. This was expensive, but I was inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s determination that terrorism should not be allowed to succeed. It was either that or keeping the chickens shut up all day, which I wasn’t prepared to do. So ignorant am I of vulpine ways that I assumed foxes would become less aggressive with the warmer weather; but the farmer said that it was precisely at this time, when they started producing cubs, that they were at their most audacious. And so it proved. For early one evening last week, when it was still light, I opened my front door to find a large fox less than ten yards away, poised to pounce on a squawking hen. I drove it away with a string of expletives, but it was later to return and finish the job.
I wonder how many chickens are killed by foxes in Britain each year. It must be an enormous number, for I have yet to meet anyone with poultry who hasn’t experienced a loss, sometimes of an entire flock. And what we all have in common is a deep loathing of their predators. If I were prime minister and wanted to rally public opinion behind a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting, I would give a free chicken to every family in the land, and that would quickly do the trick.
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