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I have
at last, after 7 years planning, got my
Fallow Deer in the Knepp Park but what an
adventure it was getting them there.
I
wanted a hundred from Petworth and eighty
from Gunton Park in Norfolk. The Petworth
herd has been in captivity for 250 years
and is one of the oldest Deer Parks in the
world. Dave Whitby, the head Keeper on the
Leckenfield Estate (Petworth Estate) invited
me to come and choose the animals I wanted.
He said that each Fallow was to be caught up
by hand, inspected, wormed and (on the
males) the antlers cut off before being
transported to Knepp.
I
must say this all sounded mad, knowing
Fallow as wild woolly animals and extremely
intolerant to being handled – how the hell
were we going to catch them? Well Dave had
done it all before with a group of mad men
called the “Mammal …………Society”.
This society is made up of dedicated deer
men willing to put life and limb at risk for
the future of the deer spices. All I can say
was when I turned up at Petworth Park, on a
very cold and wet February morning, the 40
or so men women and children that confronted
me were more reminiscent to an international
Rugby team dressed in Barbour after a
particularly wet Irish game.
The
Fallow had been fed into a holding area of
about 5 acres for a couple of weeks and that
morning there must have been a couple of
hundred animals quietly grazing in the
enclosure. Dave’s plan was to push the 200
odd deer into a prepared trap in the form of
a 200m by 40m fenced in avenue of limes. At
the bottom of a 5ft bank running down from
the Limes was a dirt track running the whole
length of the avenue. The idea was to put up
four catching nets across the avenue –
these nets are like the mist nets used for
catching bats and birds but of course bigger
and made for deer (they are designed to
collapse if touched so entangling the deer
in a mass of netting).
So
the 40 of us set off to herd the fallow into
the trap. The first thing that happened was
30 animals jumped clean over the double 6
foot 6 fence before we could surround them.
It’s a fair site seeing Fallow jump with
what seemed little effort some 18-foot. The
rest after some further slow herding were
caught. Dave Whitby then gave us
instructions that we should hide behind the
trees in the avenue and when a deer got
caught in the netting we should run down the
bank and rugby tackle the beast. When you
had done that you were to place a facemask
over the head so the animal could no longer
see and then tie up the legs before putting
the animal on your shoulders to be moved to
the next stage of the inspection and
worming.
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Sounds
simple enough doesn’t it; well it would
have been but for one thing bucks and there
antlers. In amongst the Fallow we had
trapped a fully-grown Buck (now known as
Max). He had already killed some of the does
so had to be caught and quick. Now here we
come to the part of the story that has a
hero, my cousin Hugo Smith. Now many know
Hugo at times as “The Wild Man of Glen
Vaich” so I suppose it should not have
been such a surprise when what happened
next.
We
had been told by Dave in the mornings
briefing that if we were charged by a buck
the best policy would be to flatten yourself
on the ground and hope the beast jumped over
you. Well not Hugo, the buck had made the
fatal error of tripping just at the base of
the tree Hugo was hiding behind. Hugo
without a thought charged down the slop but
the animal having had time to recover saw
that the worrier was about to be on him, so
bowing his head charged his attacker. Hugo
instead of dropping to the ground carried on
the charge; they met with a bone-shattering
crunch. Hugo managed to take some of the
impact and control it as he flipping the
beast on to its side. Ten men from all
around were then pilling in on top of the
two writhing figures and Max was ours.
Hugo,
later that day, was admitted to Hospital
with acute septersemier and spent a happy 5
hours on morphine and antibiotics drip.
Discharging himself in time to eat a Grouse
dinner with the hunting party back at Knepp.
He then went on to beat Anthony Burrell and
me at a game of “three-ways-chess” with
the plastic tub for the morphine still
dangling out of his arm.
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