# Towser



## Olly Buckle (Oct 20, 2012)

A Towser means a fierce and aggressive fighting dog, I was never very good at naming dogs, my previous dog, Curly, had long, straight, fur, not dissimilar to Towser’s, though Curly’s was various shades of brown, whereas Towser was all over, uniform, black. His ears were the long and silken ones of a Springer spaniel ancestor, as were his appealing brown eyes which melted unwary hearts when they first met him. He was mostly a coward with other dogs, as most dogs were larger than him, and dogs are by nature pragmatic creatures, but there was enough terrier in him to make him a busy little dog. He would happily spend all day digging a rat hole out from under a shed.
Bracken, according to her owner, Jack, was an English Long Dog. That is to say her ancestry was probably as mixed as Towser’s, but consisted mainly of Greyhound on her mother’s side and Irish deer hound on her father’s, she was big. Her coat was the rough, slightly shaggy, grey of the wolf hound, her build more that of an oversize greyhound and her disposition gentle and indolent. Without the intervention of humans she was perfectly content to spend the vast majority of her time in a reclining position. Occasionally, when the sun quit shining on her, she would rouse herself, stretch languidly, and amble, slowly to a new location where she could benefit from its benevolent warmth. Then she would collapse back into her former state and show her deep appreciation by remaining in it, until the restless sun once more moved on.
It was at night that she came alive, when we went lamping, hunting rabbits with lamp and dog. You creep into the field with the dog on a slip lead, a length of sash cord through the collar and hold both ends. The rabbits will be coming out of the hedges to feed in the edge of the field and when you switch the lamp on they look towards the light, their eyes reflecting red. Then run straight at the eyes, holding the lamp up. For vital seconds the rabbits stand mesmerised by the light and the dog picks up the line of sight as it looks in the direction you are taking. As he gets ahead let go one end of the lead and let it slip, a trailing lead can snag and hurt a dog. 
Nowadays, with led spotlights that run off torch batteries, lamping must be a doddle, we were using a heavy spotlight taken from a car with a lead acid battery in a carrying case. Try pointing that and controlling a dog whilst running as fast as you can.
Bracken had been taught to retrieve with a rabbit skin stuffed with gorse and learned to ‘soft mouth’, bringing her quarry back alive. Towser dispatched his own quarry, usually with a quick, terrier like, flick of the neck, similar to the one he used on rats, then brought them back. Rabbits need to be gutted quickly, slit them open, and don’t pierce that gut, it stinks. Then a pair of legs in each hand and swing them hard, centrifugal force does the removal job, and fox and badger clear it up.
 Bracken was the queen of speed, but would over shoot when they dodged and jinked, Towser might not have been as fast as her on the straight, but he could beat a rabbit on a corner. He spent a lot of time with me travelling in the car, where he would stand on the front seat, this built his shoulder muscles up. Playing, other dogs could never catch him, he could turn corners when their outside leg would give way and they would roll. Rabbits didn’t have a chance.
If the rabbit could make it to the hedge Bracken would not follow it in. She had grown up in Cornwall, where hedges are the decorative edging to the stone walls that make the real barriers between fields. Running full tilt into a stone wall is not something a dog of Bracken’s size and speed repeats very often. She showed an aversion to hedges. Towser did not and was mostly small enough to follow the rabbit’s route, enlarging it through undergrowth, before returning triumphant more often than not; but with ears ripped to pieces and a thousand burrs embedded in his fur.
On a good night, going from field to field, a dog can take thirty rabbits, of course not every night is a good night. Sometimes it is the weather, sometimes the mixi., sometimes this, sometimes that, but a good night is fun and profit; and there is nothing in the world like being out in the world and doing in the middle of the night.


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## The Backward OX (Oct 21, 2012)

I've decided I’ll probably never be able to teach you anything about punctuation and grammar, so I might as well sit back and enjoy the story.




Olly Buckle said:


> On a good night, going from field to field, a dog can take thirty rabbits, of course not every night is a good night. Sometimes it is the weather, sometimes the mixi., sometimes this, sometimes that, but a good night is fun and profit; and there is nothing in the world like being out in the world and doing in the middle of the night.



So were you poaching, or did you have a permit?


_“Permit? ‘Oo, me? I nevver bovvered wiv a permit. I could run faster than PC Plod.”_


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 21, 2012)

I used to do a garden for a widow lady whose husband had been a farmer, her sons, who now ran the farm, were happy to have us clear out the pesky rabbits when Jack visited to work on the hops. Visiting Cornwall where the farms are smaller and less economical was another matter


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## Divus (Oct 21, 2012)

Olly, by the sound of it, those were happy days.     Those are exactly what some dogs give back to their owners - good memories.

Nice story - even if a little hard on the bunnies.

Dv


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## IanMGSmith (Oct 23, 2012)

Thanks Olly,

Much enjoyed. Interesting and absorbing. Yes, I agree with Ox, grammar and punctuation could possibly be spruced up however that did not detract from my enjoyment. 

Many "goings on" in the country, of which the rest of the world is seemingly unaware. One of our neighbors used to go rabbiting (or is that ferreting?) with ferrets. Packed it in due to back trouble but still has the cage and looks after other peoples ferrets when they go away on holiday.

Thanks again for the read Olly,

Ian


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 23, 2012)

Thanks guys, glad you got somefun out of it, sorry i didn't notice your post before, Divus. I have had a couple of days devoted to my sinus.


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## The Backward OX (Oct 24, 2012)

Divus said:


> a little hard on the bunnies.



Without the _bunnies_, Divus, the Mother Country would probably have starved during the war.[-X


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## Divus (Oct 24, 2012)

Ox, the food shortages did not finish with the end of the war.    The Brits were feeding the Germans as well as themselves.       Refugees from war torn EUrope were also flooding into the UK.     Food had to be imported and there was a shortage of ships and money to pay for imports.   Then as the troops returned home the shortages became greater.   Rationing 0f food and some staples lasted long after the war was over.    Everything came at the end of a queue.

PM MacMillan said in the '50s. we working class Brits had never had it so good - yet by modern standards we were impoverished.
We ate rabbits, deer, pidgeons et al but these were mostly available in the countryside and not the cities.

To say we Brits 'won the war' is a misnomer. Better it would be to say that we managed by the skin of our teeth to survive the War on the winning side.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 24, 2012)

I came across a UN high commision for refugees report on conditions in Europe in 1946, people were still dying of starvation in parts of Austria and Germany, 50% of the population in poland had T.B., much higher in places like orphanages, and the infant death rate in Berlin was 100%, women were simply not getting enough calories to support a pregnancy. We had it tough in Britain, but I think there was always an awareness that the rest of Europe was having it much worse.


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## IanMGSmith (Oct 24, 2012)

Olly Buckle said:


> ...I think there was always an awareness that the rest of Europe was having it much worse.



...what's changed?  :neutral:


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## Divus (Oct 24, 2012)

According to my copy of "The Twentieth Century- Day by Day"  published by Dorling Kindersley with a forward written by a young Jeremy Paxman - food rationing in Britain did not finish until July 3rd 1954.   A year later in 1955 West Germany was re created as a Sovereign State with  different boundaries from those of pre -war Germany.

Hopefully one day we shall see a new history of Britain from 1937 to the end of 1999.    Hopefully access to all the historical records including  the secret archives  will be given to the author.   Only then will we have a true picture of how the war and its aftermath impacted on  British society.

I think the modern generations will be surprised as to how we lived during the 1940s, especially after the war with Germany and Japan was over.    Of course, we were still at war elsewhere in the world.

It is disturbing to me as to how today's generations view events happening in the second half of the twentieth century though twenty first century spectacles.
The Britain of today is a very different place and the England of tomorrow might be different again.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 24, 2012)

change, Divus, is the only true constant


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## dolphinlee (Oct 24, 2012)

Hello again Olly,

Thank you for sharing this. I have a few comments. 

Did someone steal your bag of full stops and leave behind an extra bag of commas? The following could be two sentences. 

A Towser means a fierce and aggressive fighting dog, I was never very good at naming dogs, my previous dog, Curly, had long, straight, fur, not dissimilar to Towser’s, though Curly’s was various shades of brown, whereas Towser was all over, uniform, black.

I was not comfortable with the many changes of tense in paragraph (3).

It was     You creep     The rabbits will be     the rabbits stand     that run off  

Wonderful sentence:

Towser did not and was mostly small enough to follow the rabbit’s route, enlarging it through undergrowth, before returning triumphant more often than not; but with ears ripped to pieces and a thousand burrs embedded in his fur.

Thank you for triggering some happy memories. 


My father was CO of a radar station in the 60s. This had been build on land that the locals had rabbited on for centuries. They didn't see why they should stop because of the wire fences that were put up around the station. A couple of times a month my mother would find a dead rabbit on the doorstep.

Years later I asked my father why he had let the locals 'poach' on the land. 

He told me that he didn't consider that it was poaching, and anyway it was their ancestral land. They did no harm and they only cut one  small hole in the fence which they carefully tired up with pieces of wire when then left.  He reminded me that not everyone was as lucky as we were and that some families struggled to put food on the table. 

My father survived the 30s and fought in the war. He never forgot what hardship was.


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