I was recommended Raising Hare, the heart warming true story of an unlikely friendship, by Chloe Dalton, Canongate, 2025, by a friend’s mother. I was worried that it would be a story of a well-meaning amateur doing more harm than good but that was entirely a false assumption. Dalton is always respectful, mindful, thoughtful and deeply caring and never forgets that the hare is a wild animal. As Chris Packham says on the cover, it is an exceptional book.
This celebrated portrait by Albrecht Dürer is truly wonderful. Dalton writes so lyrically that her descriptions of the hare’s fur and movements also paint a beautiful picture. The pencil illustrations in the book by Denise Nestor are lovely too. One sadness is that so much of the information the author seeks to help her efforts and most of the quotes about hares come from accounts of hunting.
Her observations sometimes contradict received wisdom about hare behaviour. I wondered why she refers to the hare as ‘it’ for so long. For the best of reasons – she felt uncomfortable about inflicting the indignity of an examination and frightening her (she later gives birth, so then we know).
Hares are yet another of those animals we have demonised casting them as witches or witches’ familiars, harbingers of death, revenge or misfortune. At the other extreme they have signified virtue, renewal and self-sacrifice. We seem to love assigning bad reputations to creatures we do not understand.
Leverets if found alone should almost always be left alone – the mothers leave them in the forms but of course return. This was a special case. Through it the author adapts her own habits and rediscovers “the pleasure of attachment to a place and the contentment that can be derived from exploring it fully, rather than constantly seeking ways to leave it and believing that satisfaction can only lie in novel experiences.” She more closely observes and enjoys the passing of the seasons, welcomes the sounds of nature when darkness falls.
In spite of the circumstances of her early life, the hare knew exactly what she needed “for her own care, survival and indeed reproduction.” “She needed nothing from me other than to do her no harm, which might serve as a motto for all wild animals.”
I have always been puzzled by hedge flailing especially when it is so often so extreme. Apparently it is down to farmers’ greed: crops will not thrive in the shadow of a hedge. God forbid they should not exploit every square inch of land. For hares hedges provide food in the form of weeds and refuge.
A leveret dies by Dalton’s fireside and the beauty of the author’s prose is exquisite: “She died as she had lived, without a sound. Her front paws were curled down towards her back legs as if she were in flight, her spirit running even now across the fields she had not lived to explore. Every detail of her body remained perfect, from her soft grey mouth to the moulding of her head, her long pliant ears and her unsullied fur with its indescribable hues and textures. No brush could be fine enough to capture the richness and subtlety of her beauty.”
Farm machinery is designed only for optimal efficiency with minimal use of human labour. Wildlife is not part of the equation. But, Dalton wonders, if we can create robots and drones to reap the fields, why could we not use technology to detect the presence of leverets, fawns and nesting birds so that they could be relocated rather than crushed?
The hares Dalton gets to know give lie to their reputation as flighty and easily distracted. They prefer the familiar and routine. But “The mother hare has given me a sense of an animal that is intelligent, wise, playful and devoted. A sun-loving, frugal, dignified creature, raising its young on the few scraps of land left to it in a hostile world. An animal … that gives every sign of taking pleasure in its existence …”
Dalton never treats the hare as a pet. She does not name her and rarely touches her. “The terms of [the] relationship are set by her.”
She writes again of our tendency to demonise what we do not understand. But “The hare lends itself as a symbol of the transience of life and its fleeting glory, and our dependence on nature and our careless destruction of it … perhaps we can see all nature in a hare: its simplicity and intricacy, fragility and glory, transience and beauty.” She gains a new order of priorities and an appreciation of “seeing beauty and value in the ordinary.”
“The atmosphere of calm suffused by her throughout the house lingers even when she is gone. I hope always to be able to summon it at will, along with the memory of the light and trusting touch of her paws in the palm of my hand, and her steady, unfathomable gaze. And when one day I can no longer see her, I will watch the hares in the field knowing that her being is woven into theirs, and that I have only to look up at night to see her symbol etched in the stars. I tell myself not to count the years ahead in which she might never again come, but rather cherish the days she has given me of her own free will, when she lowered her species’ instinctive guard against humans, and shared the beauty and mystery of her presence in silent and graceful companionship. I will remember her leaving, but will know that before she did, she always, first, looked back.”
We are reminded that not only is it legal to shoot hares but that there is not even a closed season for nursing hares, leaving orphaned leverets to starve. 60% of the entire hare population is killed each year by hare shoots on large estates. On average between 200 and 300 are murdered in a single hunt. They are seen as pests, vermin, but some farmers get rid of them just so as to be free of illegal hare coursers. That is some seriously upside down thinking.
There are two lovely stories at the end of the book. When the pot used to prop open the garden gate broke into fragments, it was replaced with a stone of a similar height. But the hares only came back when the pot was painstakingly repaired and reinstalled. And one summer Chloe Dalton sees a silver hare, motionless, “its fur a bright, unearthly grey”. Was this an aberration in pigmentation or did the hare bear a message? I have no difficulty in believing that this was the spirit of hare, perhaps manifesting itself in gratitude and respect.
Anemone blanda, Balkan Anemone or Windflower.
Starmer etc.
In my foolish naïvety I rather reluctantly praised Starmer to a friend the other evening for his stance over Trump’s unleashing of terror on the world. 52-card pick-up geopolitics as one commentator described “Epic fury” – fury is uncontrolled, disorderly rage and is not a good place to come from when making decisions likely to lead to global catastrophe. But Starmer refused to allow him to use UK bases. For once, I said, he has actually shown some backbone, some sense that he has a hint of a moral compass. My friend was better informed. a little more up to date – Starmer the vacillator had already capitulated. Good to see that France and Spain are standing firm.
As James O’Brien has pointed out we will never be able to judge whether Trump has actually been successful, as he will no doubt claim, because we don’t know what his goals really are. Perhaps he doesn’t either. Confusion is the point, cruelty is the point. He suggests that it was better being outright lied to, as we of course were, leading us to war in Iraq. The horrifying footage showing huge grey clouds rising from where the bombs have dropped make it seem as though Trump wants to turn our beautiful world to grey dust and ashes.
A recent announcement from the White House states that America is winning “decisively, devastatingly and without mercy.” So mercy is a bad thing now? That presumably includes the girls’ primary school, in use by young pupils, destroyed by a missile, allegedly, on February 28th, which has been condemned by Unesco as a “grave violation of humanitarian law”.
The new American Dream is … to leave America, which people are now doing in record numbers.
Starrmer’s lie, repeat, lie, repeat strategy in the House of Commons is as nauseating as it is dishonest. Following in the foot steps of Rachel Reeves, yet another Starmer nominee (for a life peerage), Baroness Limb has been caught out. She claimed to have completed a PhD at Liverpool University which she never actually did. She has admitted that she didn’t in fact receive an MA from the Institute of Linguistics either.
I wonder what will happen to the wording in our passports if the royal family is finally dismantled and rendered powerless. Perhaps the title of the Rolling Stones album would be more appropriate in any case: ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request…’
It’s good to see, as reported by Protect the Wild, that a legal challenge has been issued by Lawyers for Animals and Maria Iriart from Camp Beagle, which will allow the High Court to examine the lawfulness of the government’s ruling that protest against animal experimentation is forbidden and arrestable. As Maria Iriart says: “I have dedicated a significant part of my life to peacefully protesting against the use of animals in regulatory tests. The fact that I do not know what kind of behaviour will now constitute ‘interference’ makes the prospect of continuing to protest quite scary… I have no idea if holding up a placard, using a loudspeaker, making the wrong kind of gesture, wearing a costume, or even posting on social media, could now be a serious criminal offence.” Could this post constitute a criminal offence? And see below.
Narcissi
Crufts
Crufts is back. Is that still really going on I wondered? Abandoned by the BBC, condemned by the RSPCA but taken up by Channel 4, yes it is. PETA protesters, one of them a wheelchair user, were violently assaulted at the event last year. To reiterate, dogs are forced to wear makeup and are disfigured by ‘binding’. Flat-faced and other deformed breeds are encouraged (Bulldogs are most often too sick to give birth naturally) and females are artificially inseminated and treated as breeding machines. And that’s without mentioning the indignities of the show itself. Crufts and flat-faced dogs – Animal Wild
Miscellanea
I was more than happy to renew recently my membership of the Norfolk Wildlife Trust, passim.
I came across the word ‘protist’ again recently and needed to check again what it means. It describes living organisms that are neither animals, nor plants, nor fungi. One could put it another way: we don’t know what they are so we’ll pop them into that category.
Two articles in this morning’s local paper, one with the good news that wartime pillboxes along the Kennet & Avon Canal are being repurposed by volunteers as homes for bats. The other is gorse clearance at Greenham common. Whether or not that is a good thing in the long term for biodiversity is arguable, but as others have said nesting season has now officially started (March 1st). Birds however are not aware of this date and given the mild weather some have already at least decided upon nest sites or even begun to build them. Who is doing the clearance? Berkshire, Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust – my italics. A Greenham resident writes to the paper: “Piles of gorse have been smouldering away for weeks polluting the atmosphere and diggers [one of which caught fire] have been permanently residing there for weeks.”
Good to see that Jonathan Ross, Amanda Holden, Joanna Lumley and other celebrities have called for the immediate closure of MBR Acres which breeds dogs for experimentation, joining the 170,000 of us who have already done so. I wonder if we are all committing an offence?
I came across by chance two great quotes about violence from the superb science fiction writer Isaac Asimov whose books I first read as a teenager.
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
“It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people … If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cars and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behaviour we ought to interfere with.”
Wild primrose, bursting with rude health
Rewilding
The rewilding cash grab driving farmers off the land
This is a cogent and thought-provoking article. It would be perverse to feel no sympathy for the tenant farmers as landowners realise that they can make more money from setting the land aside for rewilding. But it remains the case that sheep farming, for example, is unsustainable in terms of the environment as well as uneconomic and heavily subsidised. Times change and sometimes that’s painful and imperfect.
EIA
I have just signed a petition (amongst others*) for the Environmental Investigation Agency calling for an end to all commercial whaling. Although catch limits were set to zero globally in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission, Japan, Norway and Iceland have killed more than 45,000 whales since then.
They also report that there are probably as few as ten Vaquita Porpoises left in the world, found only in Mexico’s Gulf of California. They have been victims as bycatch in fishing for Totoaba, whose swim bladders are used in traditional Chinese ‘medicine’. Incredibly, Mexico’s Intergovernmental Group on Sustainability in the Upper Gulf of California has just proposed new measures to reduce the protection afforded to them.
*Regarding cetaceans in captivity in America, pigeons dying prolonged deaths in netting the the Mercure Hotel in Nottingham, protecting local wildlife and more.
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Incidentally, WordPress has introduced an AI assistant which I will not be using for my writing but so far even with mundane tasks like justifying text throughout a post it has proved completely useless or, time-consumingly, worse.
But here’s a picture of a daffodil, just because.
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