It's a Ferret Life

A bunny thing happened . . .

BEING neither a farmer, nor a commuter, I don't mind the snow. I just mind the snowplough driver breezily chucking an 8ft drift into both gates as he sails past with a cheery wave.

The re-appearance of snow in the hills means ferreting. is one of the few sports that improves with snow. You know which holes the bunnies are living in from the telltale paw marks. The main difficulty with ferreting is that if things go well you will end up with a great many rabbits.

This, in terms of vermin control, is fine, and in terms of sport, even better. But in terms of carcass disposal, not so good. The under assistant east coast temporary keeper (second son), who happens to be living in a residential caravan during the week, arrived home at the weekend to announce that he and the keeper had 60 rabbits on the Thursday and 54 on the Friday in the snow.

I do not know what his caravan smells like but I can tell you that after piddling and gutting 114 rabbits and hanging them up in the game larder for the dealer to collect on his arrival home he was more or less instructed to strip naked outside the back door, blizzard or no blizzard, before coming into the house.

He still managed to put the damp, unwashed and bunny-sodden wool mittens on the back of the Aga, where they cooked gently and odiferously to the extent we thought something had been left in the oven or died under the floorboards.

By way of an offering he had brought home ten rabbits in the back of the extremely smart, if 17-year-old, Audi that our neighbour had given us - he couldn't sell it as it had no sun roof, honest - so the boot smelled as bad as its driver; not, I might say, as bad as having a cat pee in the back of a car (it has happened) but the sort of smell you have to apologise for every time you give someone a lift.

So now I have ten rabbits in the garage, a stinking car boot and the guilty party has skipped off to Edinburgh. I can deal with rabbits, but only after a fashion. They are a fiddle.

I was taught how to paunch, skin and joint rabbits by a former Gordon Highlander who used to complain that, shockingly, there were a full ten days in the year during which no game of any sort could be legally killed. He was really quite affronted.

Inspite of his tuition it took an hour to reduce the ten rabbits to a pile of joints in the garage while fending off aerial cat attacks (they sit on the joists with their tails hanging down like leopards waiting for a kill).

Try as I might, I never find rabbit very satisfactory to cook. I have a strong suspicion that if rabbit hadn't been struck from the British culinary consciousness by mixymatosis it would have disappeared off the national menu anyway.

Once it was a cheap form of fresh meat. But now you can buy easier things to deal with that come in packets with instructions and taste just fine, thank you very much. We are not going back to the days when butchers hung rows of rabbits outside their shops any more than we are going back to keeping pigeons in doocots as a source of fresh winter food. I don't think even the French have produced any culinary masterpieces with rabbit.

In desperation, I have turned for a recipe to the compendious National Ferret Welfare Society website that includes an article by a ferret-loving psychiatrist, Dr June McNicholas entitled "Do Real Men Kiss Ferrets?"

This is far more interesting than rabbit recipes, although I shall try rabbit paste, which goes in the freezer. Captivated by the ferret world, I click on to Ferrets First only to find a page offering online gambling, cheap holidays and the photo of a semi-naked woman (without ferret) inviting me to "uncover the secret to fabulously feminine lingerie."

Whatever next? Ferrets down trouser legs, I'll be bound.