The Last English Poachers (25 page)

‘We can’t do nothing with this dog, d’you want to take it over?’

I’d have a good look at the dog first – see whether it could be worth taking on. If I took the dog, I’d bring it out and drag it – put it down the drag on a dummy hare to
see if it had pace. I can tell the agility of a greyhound on the gallop, if it’s putting everything into it, if it’s chasing the lure or not, if I can bring it on or not. I have the
knowledge to see if a dog’s got it, running up that drag, chasing the lure. If it has, it’s worth bringing on.

It takes a lot of time and money to keep a working greyhound. They’re not like a little house pet that you feed a tin of chummy-chum or horsey-hearts and take for a five-minute stroll in
the park once a day. They’re mad to run and they’ve got to be exercised and trained properly, just like an athlete. There’s an old saying: ‘If you got a grief against
someone and you don’t want to fight them, give them a greyhound.’ Because they’ll be broke in a month. If you get a dog that ain’t up to standard, you’re going to
waste a lot of time and money. You can spend more hours buggering about trying to make a bad dog good than you would with six decent dogs.

The racing fraternity and, back when it was legal, the coursing fraternity, would go through a lot of dogs to find one that was right and there’d be many dodgy greyhounds they could do
nothing with. I’d take scores and scores of dogs like that off trainers and try to save them – I was known for bringing difficult dogs on. I had ways of getting its full potential out,
with techniques and tricks I knew through hunting and poaching. I used to have loads of ’chuck-outs‘ given to me from people who didn’t know how to bring dogs on, even though they
were supposed to be professional trainers – right through from the late 1970s until I got my trainer’s licence. I’d get a call:

‘D’you want a dog? I got a dog here two years old. He done this and he done that in Ireland, but nothing over here, except win a couple of trials.’

After the drag, I’d take it to a flapping track somewhere and give it a trial. Then take it round the fields on the scent of rabbits. Just flushing up the rabbits and letting the dog see
them dashing into the burrows, not letting it off after them – just something to get its attention. I’d do other stuff like that to try and make the greyhound genuine. And I was very
successful with many dogs that got returned to track racing when I was finished with them.

Others I took coursing after the live hare, when it was legal, to see if they were worth the work I was putting into them. First of all, the dogs had to be fit and tough enough to run three
courses on the trot in an eight-dog stake – assuming it got to the final. If they were, then I’d persevere with them and take them to a few meetings to see how they got on. If they
turned out to be no good for either flapping or coursing or hunting or poaching, then I’d dig a hole and shoot them. What was I supposed to do, give them to Battersea Dogs Home? I
didn’t breed them in the first place so, if there were too many dogs, that was the greedy breeders’ fault, not mine. I provided a service for those dogs that would otherwise be abused
or abandoned or starved and spend weeks or months on death row in some dog rescue place, only to be put down by a vet at the end of it.

But every greyhound is chipped now; they’re all accounted for, like a car having a log book. Dogs are checked at regular intervals throughout the year and, when one dies or has to be put
down, you have to have a form filled out by a vet, so there’s no way you can take them out into the woods and shoot them no more. In the old days, after I shot a dog and buried it, if
I’d been a religious man I’d have said a prayer. But I’m not and I’d just stand for a while with the sky all a blackness and no stars shining their lights – except for
the silver satellites beaming their pitiful pictures across the whole world and sending message pulses out into the deepest part of space, hoping for some acknowledgement from a higher life form.
And I’d think to myself – God forbid that we’re the best there is!

We used to have upwards of thirty greyhounds of our own at any one time, that we tracked and coursed and hunted and poached with, and it was hard enough work. It’s something a man does
with muscle and sinew, as well as his skill and wits. And I got nothing against people who spend all their time in front of computers, living what they call virtual lives. Imagining all the things
they dream of doing, but never taking no risks, never feeling the heat nor the cold – all safe and sound in their armchairs. Never running through a wood or climbing a tree or wading across a
stream, except in their minds. I got nothing against them either who go to expensive gyms and do all kinds of exercising to pass the time and lengthen the life and hang on by the fingernails to the
final few hours of heartbreaking humdrum. The lazy ones who won’t, need to be chained to a chair and forced to watch the same television programme being played over and over again, where half
a ton of shite’s being cooked by celebrity chefs. I got nothing against none of that.

As long as they got nothing against me.

They say too that someday the computers will invent robots to take all the interesting stuff out of life, so the salesmen can fill it with drudgery. More time for the masses. ’Course it
all depends on whether they decide to divide up the profits of that brave new world and give us all a little share. Or will they tell us it’s been swallowed up by invisible overheads and
unmentionable expenses? The coppers will be alright – need the likes of them for a good while yet, to keep law and order and send the malcontents like me, who believe in alternatives, away to
where we can’t corrupt the rest of society. Just like they used to do to me at school. They’ll keep control the way it’s done now – by printing political correctness and
doling out the opium of television to the people – until identity cards are hanging round all our necks and chips inside the brains. Spit into a computer and it’ll know your whole
history, back to the beginning of time. It makes me shake!

Hopefully, I’ll be gone before all that happens. In the meantime, as a licensed trainer, I work under rules and regulations and they can come out and do an inspection at any time. The
welfare of the dog is the most important thing and I agree with that. But, from the point of view of shooting dogs, there was so many reject greyhounds and I used to give them a chance at least,
which was more than many people did. Shooting them was quicker and more humane than taking them to the vets, because they thought they were going out for a hunt or a run. Then they’d be dead
before they knew it. At the vets, they’re in strange surroundings on a table waiting for the injections to work – they can be frightened and distressed and shivering and shaking. Unlike
us poachers, some people make a lot of money from dogs – breeders and trainers and vets and insurance companies and dog food makers that turn out tins of processed crap. They live in big
houses on prosperous pavements, wearing words of honour – and the walls built of the best brick with money for mortar. Yet they’ll criticise the likes of us for cruelty. No wonder the
world’s in such a state!

I had to take a greyhound down at Christmas time – it broke a hock and so, as I’m accountable now, I took it to the vet. There was nothing the vet could do. I knew that. I knew it
was a waste of time. Through experience, having had dogs for a lifetime, you get to know illnesses and injuries and what can be done about them and what can’t. And some vets are grasping
buggers and charge as much as solicitors these days, fleecing people out of their money. All this one did with the dog I brought down was put him on an expensive drip for a few days and the dog
died anyway, like I knew he would. I still get calls from people, but I can’t do anything for them now. Just recently, a dog got tore up by another that managed to get its muzzle loose and
ripped into its shoulder area. A lot of blood was lost and the greyhound was in pain and deep distress. The owner called me.

‘I got an old dog that was running on the flappers down in Wales.’

A flapping track is an independent unlicensed track. Anyway, he asked me if I’d shoot the dog for him. But I couldn’t. What was more humane, for me to go over there and shoot it in
familiar surroundings, or take it a long journey to the vet and have to wait with it while it got more and more distressed and then put it up on a table trembling and traumatised and knowing
something bad was going to happen to it?

Even now, you can go over to Ireland, buy a dog, put it in the back of your van and run it on a flapping track that night. There’s no rules and the welfare of those dogs ain’t
monitored. Dogs get dumped in woods – drowned, with concrete blocks round their necks – tied to trees and left to starve – all sorts. I shot them humanely but I don’t do it
any more, can’t do it any more. Nowadays, a reject dog’s supposed to be rehomed by The Retired Greyhound Trust or, if it’s badly injured or wicked, it can be
’euthanised‘ by a vet. But it don’t always happen like that.

Like I said at the beginning of this chapter on greyhounds, we don’t keep so many dogs any more – neither greyhounds nor spaniels. Just one hound at the moment and I’m thinking
about maybe another – and a spaniel. But I couldn’t be without them completely. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself, because they’re part of what I am and always will be.
And what I am don’t make me a bad person.

That’s all I’m saying!

17

I don’t believe in anything I hears no more and what I sees sometimes makes me wonder if the world ain’t, after all, completely bloody witless. And it’s never
been much different. The world I grew up in was like a mad dog, always snapping after my heels. Most of the time I managed to keep it at bay and didn’t give it the chance to savage me. But
once or twice it caught me off guard, when I was sitting back thinking about things and not paying proper attention. And I hates it when that happens.

Dragging’s about pulling a lure along a 400-yard track on a gradient for the dogs to follow. It’s a straight win system and not a matter of ‘turning’ the hare like on
traditional open or park courses. And people come from all over the country to run their dogs on our drag track – even a lot of Pakistani and Indian blokes; they loves having a bet on their
dogs and they loves the sport of it. They does a lot of coursing in Pakistan. They’re proud of their dogs and don’t like being beat by someone they considers inferior, and they got that
class thing from the British during the days of the Raj and now they’re stuck with it. But back in the 1970s, when Asian faces weren’t all that familiar in this part of the world, just
like us they could never get membership of the coursing clubs, no matter how highfalutin’ they believed themselves or their caste to be. So they liked to give their dogs a run out in the
countryside after a live hare – that way, they’d be keener for the track or the drag.

I met a couple of them at a coursing meet and we got to talking and I invited them down here, so they could come out with me. I told them where to meet, over at Bagstone, near a stream called
the Ladenbrook, where there’s lovely open ground that’s good for a run with the dogs. Anyway, me and Brian, who’s only young at the time, goes over there on a Sunday morning in a
van I had back then, with three dogs. I’m waiting there for them, thinking maybe that one or two will turn up, if any at all. The next thing, this minibus pulls up and eighteen of ’em
gets out, all with dogs. Brian takes one look at ’em and bursts out laughing.

‘What you laughing at?’

‘We can’t take all them across the fields, we’ll get nicked in five minutes.’

One of them overhears him.

‘Nicked?’

‘Don’t mind him, Ahmed, he’s just a boy.’

They thought I had permission and it was all legal, like, and how could I tell ’em now that I hadn’t, after they’d come all the way from Birmingham?

There was two farms down the end of the fields where we were, and you can imagine what the farmers must have thought, in a remote part of Gloucestershire in the 1970s, with eighteen Asians with
dogs crossing their land – and us with them. Probably thinking some refugees from a Rudyard Kipling book are on the warpath or something. We has a few runs and catches a hare, before one of
the farmers calls the police and I can just see him hysterical on the phone to the coppers.

‘Come quick! I’ve locked the women in the cellar!’

Anyway, six squad cars surround the place. Police everywhere. I send Brian off with our three dogs to make an escape across the fields and walk the four or five miles home. Me and the eighteen
Asians hides under a bridge across the Ladenbrook called the Summer Bridge and they’re all shaking in their shoes because they don’t want no trouble with the law. On the way out the
other side of the farmland, Brian gets stopped by the local policeman, copper Harris.

‘How are you, young Tovey?’

‘I’m alright.’

‘How’s your father?’

‘He’s alright too.’