An Alligator in the Bathroom...And Other Stories Read online

  This I could not do. Not only was it my job; it was the worst case of animal abuse I had seen. I asked Young Tom to get into my van.

  The procedure for an interview in those days followed Judges’ Rules. You issued a caution, same as the police, you do not have to say anything but anything you do say, and so on, and then asked your questions. You wrote down both question and answer in your notebook, and that was that. Young Tom did not have to sign, not that he would have done anyway, and not that it mattered because he took quite literally the bit about not having to say anything.

  He would not tell me how long he’d had the dog, what he did with it, why it was in such a terrible state, nothing. I had a list of questions in my book with no answers, except he did admit it was his dog and he had never taken it to a vet.

  Well, that was the first thing I did, and my vet friend, the one who gave me the free vaccines, could hardly believe his eyes either. His post-mortem found no subcutaneous fat so the conclusion was that the animal had died of starvation, a verdict made even more painful by the discovery of bits of chewed up plastic. The poor thing had eaten its food bowl.

  I went back and told Young Tom that I was going to report him. The case, I thought, was open and shut. We had my notebook, a set of photographs, the vet’s statement as expert witness, and the accused’s admission of ownership. The photographs had been taken by a police scenes-of-crime officer, when I took the body to the police station, and they were highly professional.

  RSPCA headquarters agreed to a prosecution and I had to serve the summons. Needless to say, the family’s attitude to me had changed somewhat. They were united around Young Tom and I was the devil incarnate, to be abused, spat at, and cursed to the ends of the earth. The summons was torn up, rolled into a ball and thrown on the fire. I told them the time and date of the hearing, and the likely consequences of non-appearance thereat, and left, not believing for a moment that Young Tom would turn up unassisted.

  I went and got him myself. Goodness me, he was a scruffy sod. The smell was awful, and I guessed (correctly) I should need the Nuvan Top again. He pleaded guilty, the magistrates studied the evidence, and I shan’t forget the looks of revulsion on their faces when they saw the photographs. They retired to discuss sentencing. When they returned the chairman of the bench – not, on this occasion, my favourite viscount – had thought carefully about what to say.

  ‘It is in my power to send you to prison,’ he said, ‘where prisoners and warders alike will find out what you’ve done and make your life hell. The preferred course of action is to have you taken to the market place and flogged, but unfortunately that is not an option. After due consideration, we have decided to ban you for life from keeping dogs, and to fine you £300.’

  In those days £300 was a lot of money, and an astronomical sum for somebody like Young Tom. I doubt if the magistrates believed there was anything in gypsy curses because otherwise, after a short speech from Tom, they could not have expected to see the next morning.

  None of the family ever spoke to me again except to curse and swear and threaten to get me a season ticket to A & E. I kept my visits to the camp to a necessary minimum, avoiding aggro by checking first to make sure the family was out, but I couldn’t avoid contact entirely. One day I was at my dog shelter, with Carol and the children, when the whole lot of them turned up. The abuse was pretty vile and Carol bundled the kids into my van and got in herself.

  I stood there and took it, knowing that the knives wouldn’t really come out, when a cop car arrived, blue light flashing, and my friend Sergeant Wainwright and an equally bulky PC sent the gypsies on their way. I asked the sarge how he happened to be passing, and he said not at all, they’d had a call from a member of the public.

  Carol had a slightly embarrassed look on her face.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said, ‘you’ve just had this new radio fitted, so I thought I’d better learn how to work it.’

  10

  HOW TO MAKE A FIREMAN LAUGH

  If you took the charitable view on the way some travellers treat their horses, you might use the word ‘carelessly’. I know many RSPCA inspectors who would use stronger language than that, including me, but careless happens to suit this particular story.

  The type of horse much favoured by the traveller community is the fell pony, often brown and white, with a big creamy mane and big feet, which they call a coloured horse and which, in the old days, was considered the ideal motive power for a living wagon, a caravan, which would generally weigh around a ton. For one horse to pull a ton for hours at a time, it needed to be built for work, and that’s what these fell ponies are, strong, powerful, of a quiet but determined nature.

  Some travellers had stopped on the roadside, quite a way out of Scorswick. They had coloured horses but not to pull their caravans, which were of the flash, chromium-plated variety. They had vehicles to do that, and to carry the horses, and the animals were obviously glad to have a bit of grazing even if it was beside a busy road.

  Whenever anything like this happened, my phone would start ringing, often from well-meaning but inexpert people who assumed that the horses were being poorly looked after. Sometimes, maybe often, that was the case, but not this time. I went to have a look at the half-dozen or so ponies they had and all looked fit and well.

  Still the phone kept ringing, and one call had me jumping in my van right away. ‘A little brown and white horse’ had been seen by such-and-such a wood, apparently entangled in something and in trouble. The place was several miles from the travellers’ camp, but I had no doubt about what the animal was and whence it came, and certainly the word ‘careless’ was one of several that occurred to me as I drove there.

  It took me a while to find the pony because by this time, exhausted by its struggles, it had lain down in the long grass on the edge of the wood, at the top of a steep slope. Goodness knows how it had got itself into such a mess, but it was tangled in wire – not barbed wire, but single-strand fencing wire that had been in a tight coil and so, when released, had sprung into curls and hoops that had wrapped around the body and one of the back legs of this horse. The animal was also still attached to the source of its distress, with wire heading off into the woods and out of sight.

  I thought I had the complete tool kit for every rescue eventuality – all kinds of nets, graspers, poles, things for keeping animals at a distance, things for bringing them closer, but the one thing I didn’t have was any kind of cutter mighty enough to deal with this wire. If I couldn’t cut it, I would have to untie it.

  It was a winter’s day, cold and gloomy, and my hands were soon blue. I couldn’t wear gloves and manipulate the wire but, after a good hour and more had passed, I felt I had made some progress. Covered in mud and freezing I may have been, but I had managed to uncoil some of the wire from the back leg and the body.

  The pony thought I had done even better than that, because it got up and dashed for freedom. It didn’t get far before it was brought to ground again and, frustrated, it began to twist and turn about. In my attempts to help, in among thrashing hooves and springing wire that did everything I didn’t want it to do, I was soon enmeshed. The pony and I were trapped together in a metal spider’s web that had a tortuous will of its own.

  The more the pony struggled, the tighter gripped the coils of wire around me. I had one arm free, but that was no use. In such situations, a resigned attempt at a smile might turn into hysterical laughter or, in my case, a wild imagining of what would happen to me if the pony managed to get up and charge for the woods, dragging me behind it like something out of a cowboy film.

  It was more than brawny enough to do that. Man might have dominion over the beasts of the field, but strength-wise it’s no contest. I remembered watching a farrier shoeing one of these particular beasts in a farmyard. He’d hitched it to a full-size metal farm gate. While he went into the barn to find something, the horse lifted the gate off its hinges and, panicking, whirled around with the gate like a hammer-thrower in th
e Olympics, and whacked the farrier’s van with it.

  Every attempt to loosen and undo the wire was met by more horse movement and I was getting nowhere. Daylight was disappearing and the temperature was dropping even further. I could see the headlines: ‘Man and Horse Found Frozen to Each Other’.

  For want of a simple pair of bolt cutters, my glittering career was over. Well, they say that going slowly unconscious with hypothermia is not a painful way to pass beyond, to that great animal sanctuary in the sky.

  And then the miracle happened. The fire brigade arrived. The first man on the scene was a lad I knew well, and he just stood there, laughing and laughing. The rest of the crew joined in. The woods and fields rang with jolly firemen’s guffaws.

  ‘Two animals to rescue at once,’ said one, and that set them off again. ‘The woman on the phone, she just said horse. Never mentioned RSPCA man.’ More hilarity.

  At last their kindly natures took over. They fetched their bolt cutters and set us both free. This story, I thought, will run and run, and so it did. Every time I called the brigade out to help me rescue an animal, I was asked how many animals were involved, and if that number included me.

  The firemen collected up all the wire and took it away. I checked the pony and, apart from a few sore places on its legs, it was fine once it had had a good drink. I knew there was no point in trying to find out exactly who had been careless enough to let this horse wander and get into bother. Its owner, or owners, would deny any knowledge. Not my horse, boss. No idea. Never seen it before.

  All I could do was tether it in a safe place where there was grazing. I would pop by to keep tabs and top up its water, and one day very soon it would disappear as if by magic, and reappear in the travellers’ company. There was no risk in this strategy. Good heavens, I was an experienced inspector; I knew better than to get tangled in an argument about gypsy horses. I knew exactly what would happen, and it did. I went to the ironmonger’s and bought a good pair of bolt cutters.

  11

  MY LIFE WITH BADGERS

  It had been a fairly quiet week with nothing out of the ordinary at all, then the Highways Department rang to tell me that a busy main road was about to collapse and would I kindly do something about it, and quick. Badgers had made a sett in the road embankment and, keen to explore territory on the other side, had dug tunnels or bedrooms or something and seriously undermined the road, just at the point where it took a sharpish bend, to the stage where the county surveyor had declared it unsafe and set up a diversion. This diversion was greatly inconvenient and unsuitable for the large amount of traffic so, as already stated, would I sort the matter out?

  Somebody in the highways office must have known that RSPCA inspectors had a general licence to disturb badger setts and take away matter therefrom, which of course was (and is) illegal otherwise, apart from an exception at that time that allowed fox hunters to stop up setts temporarily to prevent foxes escaping into them. We had this licence so we could gather evidence in court cases. It did not give us a free hand to stop badgers digging under main roads but that’s what the highways people wanted me to do.

  I didn’t know this particular sett but we were in February, the middle of the badger breeding season, so I thought I’d better take a badger expert with me for a second opinion on whatever we might find.

  It was not a big sett, quite small in fact, but that in itself is no sure guide. My badger-expert friend and I had both seen huge setts with only two or three mature animals at home, and small ones with eight or nine, but this we thought looked like a fairly minor installation although very active. There were three or four holes and plenty of spoil heaps, well-worn paths to and from, but no signs of breeding such as extra bedding being brought in.

  The highways people suggested blocking the badgers in, and/or gassing them. I told them they couldn’t do that. In which case, they said, I had better dig them out, perhaps by tomorrow.

  One of the main reasons for the badger laws is to make digging them up illegal. As far as I knew, nobody had ever been given a permit to get around this law, and when I contacted the Ministry of Agriculture, I could tell I was giving them a new puzzle to solve. The response was that, since I already had the general licence to disturb and take away, I might be given a further, special licence, but they would need to consider the case and put forward a recommendation to the government minister responsible.

  The highways officials couldn’t see (a) why a few hairy animals could cause such disruption, (b) why the Min of Ag as a government department couldn’t understand the urgency of the matter, and (c) why they in the county highways office should have to take a continuous stream of complaints from people living in villages, hitherto peaceful, now suffering the mighty roar of main-road traffic on diversion.

  Meanwhile, I had to make plans on the assumption that I would, or would not, get my special licence. My first idea was to cross to the dark side to consult another kind of expert, not actually a badger digger but a well-known local poacher. He suggested making purse nets, bigger versions of the ones he used for rabbiting. The badgers would bolt from the sett via their usual tunnels, and bingo.

  The problem with this idea was how to make them bolt. Digging alone wouldn’t work, which we couldn’t do anyway, because the badgers would almost certainly respond by digging themselves further in. The only way would be to put a dog into the sett, which might work if the badger had never experienced it before, but if it had, it wouldn’t flee. It would face the foe and there would be a fight.

  So, that was a non-starter. We needed more information on our sett and so mounted an all-night vigil, taking turns with some local badger enthusiasts, one of whom, called Jennie, rather stood out from the usual run of wildlifers as, to my mind, someone who had perhaps starred as a Bond girl. We did this for three nights and never saw a badger, while during the days I had the highways getting more and more aggravated, demanding action, and the ministry telling me that no decision had been made yet.

  What to do with the badgers, should we ever get hold of them, was also a pressing matter, and our solution was to build an artificial sett. The technology of such a thing is well understood now, but then there was no information available so we had to make up our own technology. The modern way is to build an underground cavern with breeze blocks, with several entrances and a surrounding fence. What we did was persuade a farmer to dig a great hole a couple of fields away and bury a metal water tank in it, in which we’d cut a couple of openings. This we managed in just one day, so that was something that went well.

  Next up was a self-proclaimed animal rights activist from town, who said he knew a lot more about badgers than we did and who objected, very noisily and regularly, to anything and everything that we attempted or thought of attempting. I did know him slightly, as I’d heard stories about his failed efforts to rear fox cubs and rehabilitate them. Not that he had a reasonable answer to our current problem. For him, the right of the badgers to dig wherever they wanted was paramount, and let the main road collapse if that happened to be the consequence. He was a nuisance, and was portrayed as such in the press who were now well onto the case. Jennie told him to something off out of it, with no result as he was impervious even to that.

  At last, after five days and nights, I got my licence to dig from the ministry. We met at dawn – me, five volunteers including Bond girl Jennie, the highways people, the police, and a JCB with driver. Also there was our animal rights man, who lay down across the entrance to the sett prepared, as he loudly proclaimed, to die rather than have the badgers dug out.

  Sergeant Wainwright, always on hand when it was something to do with animals, arrested the fellow for causing a breach of the peace and had him removed from the scene, and the digging began. Our driver was a top man at the job, and he started removing the soil from the embankment as carefully as an archaeologist with a spoon. We took it in turns to kneel beside the digger bucket, watching for any sign of a badger.

  We’d kept the nets over t
he exit holes, hoping that the animals would flee when the JCB got going, but that didn’t happen and the digger man carried on all day. We found plenty of badger evidence – bracken bedding, their internal latrine they used in bad weather – and we had to conclude that, rather than run for it, they had decided to dig for it, in which case there had to come a point when they, superior high-speed diggers though they were, would be outdug by our man with JCB.

  Dusk was gathering about us. The JCB had its lights on. On and on we went until, at last, Jennie on kneeler duty spotted a piece of badger. The soil was cleared around it – it wasn’t going anywhere, having adopted its standard defence position of curling into a ball with its head between its front legs – and I set to with my grasper. A curled-up, motionless and decidedly grumpy badger must be the most difficult animal to grasp and it took me a good half an hour before I managed it.

  This was a fine, healthy female that we popped into a cat basket before, in the encircling gloom, we set about finding her mate. That came about quite quickly and the highways department was happy. We of the badger fraternity were happy too but exhausted after our long nights of vigil and so decided to leave the animals in their baskets overnight and release them into the artificial sett in the morning.

  Of course, this would be a new experience for us and the badgers, and we made plans based on common sense and standard practice when moving large animals, such as pigs, although the lack of a bucket full of nosh would be a hindrance. We would place the cat basket next to the hole, so that the badger could see a darkness at the end of the tunnel, and we would make that tunnel very short, with sides and roof of hardboard sheets. We chose to do the male first.

  Badgers have a better power-to-weight ratio than any rock climber, and I’d only got the cat basket lid half open before he thrust his way through our feeble construction and was off. I have to say that I’d have let him go. Not only was he a very muscular body athlete; he was a highly competent butcher, and one bite from him could quite literally have had your hand off.