Mobile Kill Groups
Descendant of Norman invaders charmingly advocates medieval methods versus latest voracious interloper upon green and pleasant land: the American grey squirrel. Hilarious must-read from D.T. Max at NYT:
When you think of England, Rupert Redesdale is who you think of. He has a slanting forehead, a nose shaped like an adze and the pink face of an aristocrat from the Georgian era. But in fact his family is far older: it is one of five in Britain that can trace its roots directly back to William the Conqueror, the last successful invader of England, in 1066. “Our original name was Bertram,” he told me recently. “We were Normans.” Redesdale, a 40-year-old baron, can stand on a Northumberland hilltop and see the Rede Valley, with the Rede River running through it. He is able to say things like, “Our family had a castle in Mitford, but Robert the Bruce, the sod, knocked it down.”
…
The day I met Redesdale, he had broken off the long summer holiday from the House of Lords to try to enlist new recruits. A woman named Sue Southworth, the proprietor of the Squirrels Pantry Tea Room, was holding a meeting in her home in Cockermouth on the red squirrel. Redesdale had driven two hours to be there. He told me he knew the crowd would not be big, but his organization practices retail species elimination — he says he wants a trap in every backyard from Carlisle to Newcastle — and every pair of hands counts. He is enthusiastic and unapologetic about his work and does not use euphemisms the way the S.O.S. organizations do. “What is this ‘method of cranial concussion’?” Redesdale asked Southworth and the two other women who met him in Southworth’s high-ceilinged living room, quoting something he had heard at a red-squirrel preservation conference. “Why not just say ‘hit on the head’? Sounds better.”
…
“Can I, um, suggest something?” Redesdale said to the three women. He was seated on a couch with a red-squirrel throw. “I was thinking . . . it would be great to form a sort of mobile kill group.” He explained: “We just knock on people’s doors and find out if there’s a gray and get them to put the traps in.” One person a day, he said, would go around and do the actual killings. The women gave Redesdale a “Candid Camera” look. Was this a joke?
Redesdale doesn’t travel alone. Always by his side is a man named Paul Parker. Parker is a professional pest controller from Newcastle. He keeps 300 dead grays in his freezer, seven of them skinned, waiting for the day he will have time to cook them. When I asked Redesdale how many squirrels the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership had killed to date, he said, “We’ve taken 2,000 whatsis. . . .” and Parker added, in his heavy Newcastle accent, “2,000 — 300 — 32.” They laughed like boys killing flies for sport.
“And then at the end of the week,” Redesdale continued, speaking to the three women, “we’ll probably have 1,000 squirrels taken out. If we do that, that will knock them back two years in their advance.” He added, “We’d get a lot of publicity.”
“And the fun of killing them as well,” Parker said. Parker and Redesdale laughed again, Falstaff and Prince Hal. This time the women smiled too, a bit nervously.
British nobility may have been cut down to size since Bertram’s day, but the head doesn’t roll far from the chopping block. William the Bastard would be proud!
Being descended from a old Anglo-Saxon family myself, pre-Norman yeomanry with roots in the direct path between Hastings and London, I should note that we’re more or less over that Norman Invasion thing, and appreciate the fact that each wave of invaders to the British Isles brought something that helped make Britain Great. William the Bastard, utter head-cleaving ruthlessness.
Redesdale and Parker didn’t tell me there was going to be a gray squirrel in the trunk of their car. We were in the gift shop at the south end of the Northumberland national park, near the town of Hexham. It was the day after the meeting in Sue Southworth’s living room, and Redesdale had promised to take me to see a place where he had cleared out grays and the reds had come back in. He and Parker had been busy. The gray toll was now 2,353, up 21 from the day before.
Redesdale sat with Parker, who was dressed in the exterminator outfit he wears: toxic-green sweater and pants. With them was a local groundskeeper. They were looking at maps of Northumberland, seeing how the war was going. Redesdale explained the Red Squirrel Protection Partnership to the groundskeeper. “So you on board for being part of the killing team?” he asked the man.
“Aye.”
“Brilliant.”
Redesdale has a strained relationship with the main red-squirrel protection groups: they need him; they call him sometimes when they get a gray squirrel sighting over their toll-free hot line; but he takes up a lot of their time. Carri Nicholson, the project manager for S.O.S., told me that she thinks of Redesdale as a kind of naughty child. “If you can’t play nicely, you’ll have to go to your room,” she said she tells him.
…
Britain is not a place where killing animals goes down easily anymore. Animal-rights advocates put themselves between the hunter and the fox he pursued until hunting with hounds was outlawed a few years ago after extensive parliamentary debate. Highways have toad crossings. Many people prefer to build little bridges for squirrels over roadways — the S.O.S. Web site provides a blueprint — than to spend their time killing animals.
This mood shifts only when an animal threatens the carefully set ecological dinner party that is rural England. I saw this force at work when Redesdale and Parker set out to convert a woman at the gift shop at the Northumberland national park. Like many people Redesdale talks to, she was at first surprised at what he told her. She said she thought she was part of the effort already: she supported Save Our Squirrels.
Redesdale clarified: “There are two organizations. They promote red squirrels; we kill grays. We just kill grays.”
“We just kill grays, that’s all,” Parker echoed.
The woman, who looked to be in her 60s, gave the “Candid Camera” look.
“But surely the two go together, don’t they?” she asked.
Redesdale explained why they did not. He said that to preserve reds you had to wage war on the grays without pity.
Writer notes Lord Redesdale isn’t crazy about being a lord, isn’t crazy about hunting, and for all his ruthless enthusiasm for squirrel mayhem, would rather leave the dirty work to the peasants.
All the same, Redesdale was the officer; Parker, the enlisted man. If Redesdale did not kill the squirrel, he would never be able to lead. And had his family not led for 1,000 years? So we drove to an isolated parking lot, and Parker took the cage out of the trunk. He put the trap — “it’s me killing trap,” he said — on the asphalt. This was the place this animal was going to die.
The squirrel, large and dark gray with just a hint of red to his fur, wheeled around the cage looking for a way out. Then it made a piteous noise, a whee-whee-whee sound. Parker handed the air rifle to Redesdale, and he pointed it.
“That’s the, uh, trigger?” Redesdale said.
“That’s right,” Parker said.
The squirrel paused. Redesdale steadied the barrel over its head. Then came the shot.
“You’ve got it,” Parker said softly.
But he hadn’t.
“Is it dead?” I asked stupidly.
The squirrel raced around the cage, blood dripping from somewhere around its mouth. WHEE-WHEE-WHEE. The same noise.
“I know it’s bad when they run,” Redesdale apologized.
Major h/t to superlative anthroblogger John Hawks.
Speaking of Small Dead Animals, welcome Canadian roadkill! Come on in. Cute rodents aren’t the only ones getting their heads bashed around here. But on the subject of rodents … and rodent appeasement. Well, no one’s perfected. Some, however, merit honors.
Topics: Britain
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:08 am on Saturday, October 13, 2007
5 Responses to “Mobile Kill Groups”
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October 13th, 2007 at 11:42 am
The amazing thing about this is I’ve just finished reading a magazine (dated 1972) in which a department of natural resource manager commented that in Michigan’s (USA) near past there were literally swarms of migrating Grey and Fox Squirrels during the fall that caused untold damage to farmers crops. “Farmers killed thousands with clubs and stones.” Hunters recorded a record of 20,000 squirrels taken in a week only 12 men. Redesdale would be in heaven — or a straight jacket !
October 13th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
Sheer anti-Americanism.
Actually, I hate squirrels. They raid my bird feeder and dig up my spring flower bulbs.
It was an entertaining article though. It’s always amusing when upper-crust Brits talk.
October 13th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
rats = rats
squirrels = bushy tailed tree rats
pigeons = sky rats
deer = rats on stilts
October 13th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
Are you sure that wasn’t a Monty Python skit?
October 13th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Heh,
I understand the man completely. I’ve got a lovely business going with the local grey squirrel population. There’s several of them that love about the trees in my yard. i ffed them nuts, and they, in turn, help me to bait the cats from my neighbors who try and pick on the squirrels.
The greys will lure the cats into my yard, whereupon i can plink at them with my pellet gun. Stupid cats even come back every now and then. It’s funny as all get out to see the cats screeching from getting plinked on their back side, and the grey squirrels up in the trees chittering after them and watching them meooooow and run away.
Afterwards, the squirrels come down to my porch and i put out a plate of nuts for them and all’s right with the world.
I’ll take squirrels over cats any day of the year.
Respects,