An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Page 15

  We often had the abandoned ones brought in too, so in the weeks after Christmas our animal rescue centres were packed tight with innocent little customers. In a bid to reduce this major welfare problem, I always tried to get myself on to the local BBC radio station, or sometimes Yorkshire Television, to make a plea on behalf of puppies and kittens not to be given as presents, and to try and bring home the reality of a situation that otherwise was clouded by cuddliness and fluffiness.

  One of the tricks we used to pull on the TV required an abandoned litter of pups or kittens, and alas we were rarely without same. I would go on, do the interview holding one puppy or kitten, with a little sob story to go with it, and every time without exception the TV station’s switchboard would be jammed by eager adopters. With any luck, we might find good homes for the whole litter this way, with each volunteer thinking that he or she had got the very pup or kit seen on TV. All in a good cause.

  One Christmas, my very good friend on BBC Radio Leeds rang me to say they were planning a programme to be broadcast by all the Yorkshire stations, covering the whole region, and would I do an interview that they could slot in. Well, of course I would, and I agreed to bring a kitten and a puppy along for sound effects.

  I would go to the small, unmanned studio the BBC had near by, where the practice was (and is) to get the key from a neighbour, let yourself in, pick up a phone and talk to someone at the station, who would tell you which buttons to press. My problem was finding the time to go to York to pick up a pup and a kitten because I didn’t have any at that moment and, in the end, the interview date arrived without my accomplishing this task. So, I decided to wing it and hope for the best.

  Tuned in and turned on, my interviewing friend said offline that he hoped I’d brought some really noisy animals along, as that would add greatly to the impact of our story. Oh yes, I said, I’ve got them in a basket here, but I can’t guarantee they’ll perform to cue. Miaowing and purring and puppy-dog whimpering cannot necessarily be produced to order. They normally make noises only when they’re hungry, or they’re upset, or they’re looking for mummy. Even so, my amiable radio presenter had every confidence.

  We went through all the usual points – lifetime commitment, food and water, animals can’t be left at home willy-nilly, training, veterinary expenses and so on – then my man said ‘Right, Inspector Langdale, I know you have some kittens and puppies there with you. Can you describe them for us?’

  This was not a problem. I had a long history of looking after such animals, so I just had to pick a few at random from memory, a brown and white pup with black socks, a ginger kitten, a tabby one, and these were on the way to recovery after being abandoned in a cardboard box in the woods and being found by a dog walker. I really laid it on thick, filling in as much of my remaining time as I could.

  ‘That’s great. Now, can you put one near the microphone and maybe we’ll be able to hear it.’

  At a loss to know what to do, I made an attempt at a kitten noise, a sort of mini-miaow that came out like somebody had run over a cat with a squeaky bicycle wheel. I remembered Percy Edwards on the radio doing every bird there is, and every animal too. Where were you, Percy, when I needed you?

  ‘I don’t think the acoustics in that studio can be up to scratch,’ said my friend, his voice a touch strangulated. ‘I’ll send a memo to the maintenance department. Now (cough, splutter, excuse me), what about one of the puppies?’

  If my attempt at feline calls had been terrible, you should have heard the canine. Not even the worst pop singer could have made a more horrible noise, and not even the blindest of the faithful could have believed it was a real animal. Going wuff wuff would have been better.

  My friend had no comment for a moment, perhaps because he was choking. When he recovered his non-corpsing self, he came back briefly to me to thank me, then made an announcement, introducing the next stage of the programme.

  ‘Crikey, Carter, what was that about?’ he said. ‘Don’t give up the day job, will you?’

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ I said. ‘Never mind. You can edit those bits out.’

  ‘Edit them out? A trifle late for that. Carter Langdale, famous animal impressionist, has just made his debut live across the whole of Yorkshire and beyond. The engineers here have already got you on the Christmas tape.’

  20

  A PRIMATE THAT PREFERRED CORNFLAKES TO PORRIDGE

  Every United Nations country is signed up to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which regulates or prohibits trade in all the primate species (except us) depending on how immediate their danger is. In some countries, such as Israel and the Netherlands, there are national laws prohibiting the keeping of primates as pets, and in the UK we have the Dangerous Wild Animals Act and a licensing system. There are campaigning societies, sanctuaries, charities, and public opinion. For instance, most people in the UK now disagree with keeping primates as pets, yet the number – mostly small monkeys – being kept has stayed fairly steady over the years, in the low thousands, perhaps as many as three thousand. Nobody can say how many of these are legally bred, or how many are illegally farmed, or caught wild and illegally imported.

  In the wild, primates live only with others of the same species. They are social animals. Having a single monkey in a house with a few humans is as disastrous for the monkey as it would be for you, were you to find yourself naked and alone, hoping to get along with a family of gorillas. Yes, dogs are social animals too, but a dog will adopt a human, or a family of humans, as its pack-mates. A monkey will not do that.

  Why do people want to keep such an unsuitable animal as a companion or, worse, as a curiosity? Good question. We can say, however, that anyone stupid enough to buy a primate as a pet will probably not do so again. Having a monkey in the house is nothing at all like having a dog or a gerbil. It is much more like having a highly agile, physically capable human baby, except that the baby will almost certainly die.

  Of course, that is the way we think now. Things used to be different – very different before the Act of 1976, and even after that for years. In the 1960s and early 70s it became fashionable among various classes of society to have unusual pets and the Act was a response to that foolishness. It gave local authorities the power to license the keeping of a wild animal, to refuse licences and to seize unlicensed animals; also it defined which were the animals, from aardvarks and alligators to vipers and wandering spiders and back again, including many of the monkeys and apes.

  This Act supposedly stopped you from ringing up a dealer and buying a tiger, an emu or a giant panda but, regardless of licensing, you could still order a monkey from Exchange & Mart or Cage and Aviary magazine, which is what the chap who called me had done. Actually, it was his wife who called, who sounded on the phone rather like Carol sometimes does when she believes I have failed the common-sense test.

  She told me the story. A wooden crate had been delivered that supposedly contained a marmoset. These are very small monkeys, only eight inches tall, from Brazil. They were among the least endangered of primates and, not being on the 1976 Act list, did not require a licence to be kept. In the wild, they live in family groups of a dozen or fifteen and have a specialised diet that includes tree sap, which they get by digging into trees with their claw-like nails, insects and fruit in season. Being considered a tasty morsel by many predators, they are very watchful and alert to danger but their small size and sweet, pretty appearance, made (and makes) them a monkey of choice among those crazy folk searching the classified ads.

  Our man hadn’t questioned why the crate was so big, something about the size of a tea chest cut in half. Obviously, this was to make monkey transport more comfortable. He’d knelt down and peered through one of the air holes drilled in the box sides. All he could see was an eye, like his own, looking at him with equal curiosity. Crawling round and looking through more holes produced the same result: an eye.

  This wasn’t getting him anywhere so he’d taken a hammer and c
hisel to the box top. The wood came away but so did the layer of wire mesh beneath, revealing not a sweet little marmoset but a much bigger animal and a fierce one at that, which leapt at our man and bit his hand to the bone. Shrieking in pain and shock, he fell over backwards, while the gorilla or whatever it was hurtled around the hallway, swinging from the light fittings, ripping curtains from the window, knocking pictures off the wall and vases off the shelf, and generally wrecking the joint, screaming in fury all the time.

  The man’s wife, showing more presence of mind than her husband and telling him what she thought of his choice of pet, chased their guest into the kitchen, shut the door, found the telephone luckily still attached to the outside world, and called the RSPCA, the front-line emergency service when you have an escaped wild animal in the kitchen.

  When I turned up, the man was sitting in a chair looking decidedly miserable, with one hand oozing blood through a thick layer of bandages. I listened to his side of the tale, frequently interrupted by an extremely cross wife who completely failed to see that, as her husband claimed, it was all the fault of the supplier who had sent the wrong beast. From their description, it sounded like a baboon. Baboons are among the largest of the African primates, growing to four feet tall. This one they said was about three feet, so it was a young one but still it had the highly functional canine teeth of the species, of which our man had had intimate experience.

  I got quite excited. I’d never been close to a baboon before. I went to the kitchen door and listened. All was quiet, so I opened the door a fraction. Couldn’t see him so I opened a bit more. I could hear him all right, chuntering away somewhere behind the door, and what I could see was almost beyond belief. The floor was covered with a mountain of pots and pans, broken crockery, broken glass, and the entire contents of the cutlery drawer. Well, you know what’s in your own kitchen. Imagine emptying all the cupboards and drawers and throwing the lot all over the place, and you have the picture.

  Worse, this clever near-human, presumably hungry after his journey, had sampled everything edible that he could find. Things in packets were no problem, so there was cocoa, sugar, lentils, tea, gravy powder, spaghetti, everything, everywhere. He’d clearly learned how to open jars because coffee powder, marmalade and pickled onions were added to the mess, and his attempts to get ketchup, salad cream and brown sauce out of the bottles had given the walls and ceiling a whole new colour scheme.

  I retreated quietly to my van and came back with my largest basket and my grasper. Pushing the basket ahead of me through the door, I sneaked into the kitchen and shut myself in. There he was, in the corner, sitting on the work surface – and what a sight. I’m afraid I had to laugh at him because he was covered from head to foot in flour and porridge oats, smeared all over with jam and whatever, while chewing the contents of the bread bin. Baboons will eat almost anything that can be eaten, and he was demonstrating this for a fact.

  He couldn’t see the joke at all but he saw me, and he went mad, running up and down the worktop, screaming his defiance and baring his very impressive teeth. When I picked up my grasper he went even crazier, throwing anything that came to hand. He hadn’t learned how to open tins but he knew how to throw them accurately and hard. Sugar lumps didn’t hurt and he ate most of them anyway, but knives, scissors and cans of beans I had to dodge, or not as I was trying to stand there calmly, waiting for the storm to abate.

  After ten minutes or so, he settled down to chomp his way through a packet of cornflakes, lubricated by finger-scrapings from a jar of Marmite, and I tried to creep up on him, grasper in hand. Very slowly I reached out but as soon as the loop was anywhere near his head he knocked it away. This went on for another ten minutes and, for the moment, I conceded. I had to try a different plan.

  As standard issue, we had tranquilliser tablets that were supposed to help us subdue violent animals, although instructions were never specific about how we got said animals to swallow a tablet; they were mainly used as a painkiller and calmative for animals injured in an accident. Just a few days before, I had used one on a dog that had been hit by a car and given a broken leg so, I thought, maybe they would work with a baboon. I asked the lady to pop out to the shop to get some bananas.

  Back in the kitchen, the baboon hadn’t moved but had turned his attention from the cornflakes to a jar of stuffed olives. Bravely I turned my back on him, so he couldn’t see me peeling away some of the skin of a banana, pushing two tranquilliser tablets into the fruit, and smoothing the skin back up. I held it out. He grabbed it eagerly, whipped the skin off faster than the eye could see and munched his way through, pausing only very briefly to spit my tablets across the room.

  Baboons’ faces are not as expressive as some primates’ but ‘Where’s my next banana, idiot?’ was clear enough. I had no more ideas other than to keep trying, so that’s what I did. Four bananas and eight spat-out tablets later, I really had nothing to say to the increasingly impatient lady on the other side of the kitchen door. Remember, at this point she hadn’t seen what I’d seen, although she might have guessed some of it after witnessing the destruction of her hallway.

  Realising there were no more bananas, the baboon became angry, running up and down the worktop again then leaping up to grab the central light fitting. I didn’t know if he’d pull it down or use it as a staging post in his attack on me. In fact, he returned to his favourite place and cast around for something else to eat. Nothing caught his eye, so he threw a few more tins at me and went back to his cornflakes.

  The only tactic I had left was to bore him into submission. It took another twenty minutes at least before he couldn’t be bothered to knock the grasper away, and I got him.

  I’d had some big dogs in my grasper before then, but even the most powerful Rottweiler was nothing compared to a baboon on the end of a fishing rod. I was bigger, stronger and more intelligent, I said to myself, and therefore I must eventually emerge the victor in this unique battle, RSPCA inspector versus mad baboon. I’d decided long ago that my basket was never going to be up to the job so the bleeding husband had been made ready with the original box, a hammer and nails. He came in with the box, I held the beast down in it with my grasper, he whacked some nails in and I pulled my grasper wire free.

  As we shuffled out of the kitchen with our burden, the woman came in to see, for the first time, the mind-boggling mess that only a determined gang of ten primary-school children, or one baboon, could have made. Not surprisingly, she was speechless, but the looks she was giving her husband spoke volumes. He sounded rather dispirited when making his lame promise to forgo all thoughts of ever having a monkey as a pet, and wondering what were his chances of getting compensation from the dealer.

  I thought those chances were about the same as those of the dealer getting him to pay the bill for laundering a flour-caked baboon. I could go home, change, and send my uniform to the cleaners. They had a house and a marriage to mend. The baboon went back to the dealer.

  21

  A CALL NOT MEANT FOR ME

  We inspectors in those days were the resource everyone turned to, whenever there was any kind of a problem with any kind of an animal, and we were thoroughly trained, in depth and breadth, to cope with whatever the world might throw at us, with one serious exception. There wasn’t – and still isn’t – any training in covert investigation, as one might want to do if confronted by animal crime, especially wildlife crime.

  Among the established forces of law and order, there is a great deal of skill and training in such investigations, but animal crime, especially wildlife crime, is not a high priority. Ordinary police officers, trained as they are to deal with crimes committed by humans against other humans, will have had no experience with badger diggers, cock- and dog-fighters, rare-egg thieves, hare coursers, deer poachers, salmon poachers, horse thieves, sheep rustlers, and so on. Although every one of our police forces appoints at least one and sometimes two wildlife officers, they can never hope to combat everything that goes on in the woo
ds, fields and rivers.

  Our chief interest in the RSPCA of course was crime involving animal cruelty, suffering and illegal killing but, because we inspectors lacked investigative training – or encouragement, come to that – the tendency was always to concentrate on the stuff we knew we could handle. We would tend to ignore the things we were not confident about, or we’d pass them to the police, even when we knew that probably nothing would be done.

  I’m sure I must have been guilty of this on occasions, with an equal measure of frustration that investigating crime, with all the attendant skills and abilities such as surveillance and undercover evidence gathering, was beyond an officer like me, already with too much work to do.

  My life turned a corner one weekend, one of my double-duty covering weekends, when calls from a more northerly district were diverted to me. A young chap rang, who told me he and his wife had moved two or three years before into a small village up on the North Yorks moors and, over that time, had become increasingly concerned at what they saw as a decline in wildlife. They were keen birdwatchers and wildlife spotters in general, and they had realised that something was going wrong.

  Central to it all, they were sure, was an elderly man, a retired gamekeeper, who had been recruited part-time by a local landowner to look after the pheasants for a small shoot. This old keeper seemed to be taking his duties very seriously indeed.

  On one evening walk, out with the dog, the young couple had found a dead tawny owl hanging from a tree and, near by, a pole trap. This is a spring-loaded device like a small gin trap, called a pole trap because that’s where they are put, on top of a pole, in the knowledge that such a perch will be used by a raptor, to survey the ground, to launch an attack, or as a plucking post when the raptor already has its prey. The trap springs when the bird lands, crushing its legs. As the bird struggles, the trap falls off the post and dangles on a chain, leaving the bird hanging upside down to die slowly (if it hasn’t died of shock), or to be killed when the trapper turns up to inspect his grisly machine.