What is the correct expression to wear, I wonder, when you’ve just caught a squirrel in your squirrel trap? Guilt? Pain? Sorrow? Fear at the possibility of a 3 a.m. knock at the door from the boot boys of the RSPCA?
The expression you definitely shouldn’t wear, apparently, is one suggestive that you might have taken any pleasure in poor, sweet, bushy-tailed Mr Nutkin’s death. This was the mistake made by Defra secretary of state Owen ‘Butcher’ Paterson, who was revealed over the weekend to have upset visiting Tory colleagues by showing pictures of himself cheerfully posing with the decapitated victims of his Kania 2000 squirrel traps.
‘I’m not sure what was more shocking — the dead squirrels or the smile on Owen’s face,’ a ‘Conservative who has seen the picture’ was quoted as saying.
A Conservative? Really? Things are even worse than I thought. Tories are traditionally supposed to be the party of the shires, of bloody roast beef, of nature red in tooth and claw. If it’s no longer acceptable even among this constituency to take righteous pleasure in the death of the verminous foreign invader which has been buggering up your trees, then truly the ravens have flown the Tower, Helm’s Deep has fallen and we might as well down the hemlock now.
Since moving to the country six months ago, I’ve got a lot more hardline on this issue. You can’t live in close proximity to nature without realising very quickly how callous it is, how utterly remote from the anthropo-morphised parody thereof we get served up by BBC wildlife show presenters and RSPCA campaigners.
Take the lambs now frolicking and gambolling in the fields all around me. I love them: every day, on my morning walks with Daisy the spaniel, they gladden my heart.
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