Shooting & Fishing: Where have all the rabbits gone?

Published on Wednesday 24 June 2009 14:58

I had this idea, which probably wasn't a very good one, that I should take Crumpet on a rabbitting expedition. By which I mean expose her to a field full of rabbits and tell her not to chase them.

This is the real-world equivalent of the rabbit pen, which professional gun dog trainers often build to teach puppies, first of all what they are meant to be looking for, and secondly not to chase them.

Rather unfair really: here's a frisky, frolicking bunny all lovely and furry and smelly; but on no account are you to go near it, until I say so.

It is certainly a tall order for Crumpet the trainee gun dog at barely a year old. But it struck me that if we could maintain some semblance of control in the face of rabbits then there was hope for the pair of us yet.

We recently acquired from Alf the shooting man's companion: one of those dummies that fires into the air with the help of a long .22 round detonated up its bottom.

The dog is meant to look suitably impressed and sit until they're blinking with boredom until told to go and get it. And it has been working pretty well, which was why I thought we might progress to rabbits.

I could not be quite sure that she would make the connection between a piece of heavy duty sponge wrapped in canvas going bang and flying through the air, and a field full of brown things scuttling about. (My father never had much luck training his dogs because, my brother reckoned, the dummy was wrapped in an old rabbit skin and rabbits don't fly, so possibly the dogs twigged there was something not quite right.)

We have no fears about her retrieving skills. She will retrieve whether you like it or not: socks, hats, shoes, cat food tins off the boiler room sink – a three-foot jump.

Her latest game, not a very nice one, has been bringing in baby birds. She more or less treats the big rhodie bush in the front of the house like a climbing frame, scrambling up into the branches and coming back with pathetic baby thrushes still alive.

And I am sorry to say that all that patient cajoling and whispering sweet things into her ear to "drop it", which works when she is carrying a dummy, rather goes by the board when she has a struggling baby bird in her jaws.

Last week she tried to climb a lime tree to get at a nest in the lower branches and actually got four feet up the main trunk before falling off.

So the sooner we get on to something useful, like rabbits, the better. Our first choice of rabbit territory was the gorse around the wind farm, only to find they had disappeared since last year.

So we headed for the other rabbit spot where we used to bump off 50 with a rifle in an hour and make barely a dent in the population, only to find that, too, was bare, save for a very old cock pheasant warily stalking the edges of some rushes. Crumpet took one look and started shaking with excitement. At which point a roebuck crashed out of the bushes and, had she not been on the lead, I can safely say Crumpet would have been gone.

So some way to go in the obedience stakes then. But the disappearing rabbits are a bit of a mystery. Myxomatosis? Nah. I blame global warming. n [e-mail]