Impact of land infiltration

I have two fields and some buildings I rent about three miles away. We cut these fields for silage and I am rolling them. I leave a nice stripy pattern in the grass – it isn’t quite Wimbledon, but it looks nice from the road.

The second field has a good covering of grass and I notice it is quite flattened down over about half the field. My first thought is sheep have been in it, so I drive around the outside again, but the fences are all intact. No sheep footprints are in the muddy gateway, either.

Sheep are in the next field, but they are my neighbour‘s pedigree Texels and have too many troughs scattered about for them to go far. I finish the rolling and about half the field shows signs of animal activity on a regular basis.

The next day, I make nonchalant enquiries, and it doesn’t take long to discover someone is taking about 12 dogs for a walk in the fields twice a day. This rings alarm bells.

I love dogs – some of my best friends have been dogs and I can see the attraction of taking 12 dogs for a walk in those fields. But dogs don’t come on their own – they bring mess with them. I am on our parish council and dog mess is on the agenda most months. Our village is full of dogs. People regularly complain of dog mess in their gardens and they are often people who don’t have dogs. In my case, I wouldn’t have known all those dogs were going in my fields if less grass had been in there for them to leave marks. They would have continued to do it until we brought the grass home for silage.

Who knows what else we would have brought home with the grass? It could have been Neospora. The costs of that and the implications are horrific. It is a largely hidden danger. Most dog owners are blissfully unaware of the disease problems their dogs can spread.

Some education needs to be done. At first, I felt mean stopping the dog walking, but the more you think about it, the more irresponsible it becomes. We test for Neospora along with the bulk milk test that monitors fluke. Perhaps more should be done to monitor dogs.

Hare habitat

The largest block of land I rent brings two extra benefits – it goes up to 1,000 feet and the panoramic views are spectacular. I never tire of going and a day up there on the tractor is a delight. I love the view and watching the wildlife. When I took the land on, I was amazed and delighted to find so many brown hares.

Over the years I have had the land, their numbers have increased, for two reasons. The “shoot” and the keeper became aware of my love of hares, so they stopped shooting them. It is quite important for a shoot to have good relations with the person farming the land. “Any chance you could put a bit of kale in that corner next to the wood?” So there was a sort of amicable trade-off with regards to the hares.

For my part, I always made sure the hares had cover. For example, we had about 10 acres of stubble turnips last year that we let for sheep keep. The residue of the crop has gone to seed now and needs ploughing in, but I know leverets are there, so I will leave it for a month. At one time, the keeper – who likes to count things – reckoned 100 brown hares were on my 200-odd acres and in the adjoining woods. But, life can be a bitch and good things rarely last forever.

A public footpath runs across this land and anyone walking on it would see lots of hares. An acquaintance told the world, via Facebook, about the hares. “Whatever did you do that for?” I asked. I didn’t use those exact words (a lot of bad language was mixed in). “Everyone else has a right to see those hares as well as you,” the acquaintance replied. Everyone else included organised hare coursers, who have decimated the hare population.

I have been up there a lot on the tractor lately and seen just 10 adult hares. Or I could have seen 1 hare 10 times; there’s no way of knowing. Everyone locally knows what’s going on because the hare coursers seem beyond the law. They damage fences, leave gates open, pilfer, and intimidate and abandon unwanted dogs in distressing circumstances. Local wildlife groups are strangely quiet – if a farmer did something that killed lots of hares, they would have you taken out and shot.

‘Weapon’ of choice

Help is at hand from an unlikely source, however. Hare coursing is seasonal – their dogs hunt by sight and they can’t hunt when crops are high. These coursers will travel huge distances to further their activities. They have discovered there is year-round “sport” to be had terrorising wild boar in the Forest of Dean. Of course, this requires a very different sort of dog.

The “weapon” of choice is a Rottweiler and Irish wolfhound cross. An added advantage exists from their point of view – the quarry will fight back. Quite what horrific injuries these dogs will receive we will probably never know.

There has, in recent years, been a proliferation of designer cross-bred dogs as pets, frequently involving use of the poodle, which can command extraordinary prices. I don’t know what breeds are covered by the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, but now we have a small element of society that is breeding cross-bred, dangerous dogs by choice. It could be my character is flawed, but I feel less compassion for the wild boar than I do for “my” hares.

It reminds me a bit about an incident during the last foot-and-mouth outbreak. I was out on the tractor one day and a jogger was crossing my fields. I stopped to tell him how irresponsible he was and he completely lost it. It’s the only example of jogger rage I have ever seen. I was so taken aback by his outburst that I kept my cool, which is unusual for me.

He threatened me with serious injury if I would only get off the tractor. I resisted the temptation (it was probably 10 years too late, anyway), but thought “I’ll have him”. I telephoned 999 and said I had been threatened. Nothing happened. I saw the local policeman a month later and asked him why they hadn’t responded. “We talked about it at the station and decided if there was only one jogger, Roger Evans was well able to look after himself,” he said. I suspect wild boar are mostly well able to look after themselves.

This article has a doggy theme, but I suspect, from dog parasites to dangerous dogs with horrific injuries, there are implications for your profession. It is you who will have to pick up the pieces.