In the first of a series of guest blogs building a portrait of the reality of snares, Jill Flye tells the story of her beloved dog Monty and the day he fell victim to a snare.
EVERY now and then another scientific study demonstrates that animals experience emotions that can compare with ours. What surprises me is that we still feel the need to prove this – it is obvious to anyone with a dog.
I defy anyone to hear Monty, my English Pointer, singing away in the car as we drive to his favourite running places, and not recognise his excitement. Or watch him fly across a field, without seeing his sheer, exuberant joy in the act of running. When Pippin, our terrier died, Monty missed her terribly, as we all did. He lost his bounce, along with his appetite.
He became a miserable bag of bones. We bought a Springer Spaniel puppy, Meg, and Monty started to eat again. And bounce around the house like a fool again. Anyone could see that he adored that puppy as he cleaned her face with all the tenderness of a new father.
Monty’s affection for people is obvious too. At 26kg he must be the biggest lap dog in Scotland. When we first saw him in the rescue kennels, wearing a fleecy jacket because he was so thin and shivery, he leant up against my son’s legs, and Sam declared ‘Mum, I’m not leaving without him!’ He didn’t have to say it; the big goofy hound had stolen my heart too.
And anyone who heard him scream and howl when he was caught in the snare would have recognised the pain and terror he was feeling.
We were walking beside the canal, Monty and puppy Meg making little forays in and out of the woods beside the towpath. It was a pleasant, sunny day, so we went a bit further than usual. And then it all changed. There was that terrible screaming, howling noise, and only Meg ran back out of the woods. I tore about frantically searching for Monty. His howls were dreadful, but luckily they led me to him in minutes.
He was in a clearing, lurching about trying to come to me. I saw a wire that I thought was cutting into his leg, but it was the leg that was swelling around the taut wire. It had taken fur off, and was causing him terrible pain and distress, but thankfully I’d got to him before he was badly injured. When I released his leg, the loop of wire hung from the tree branch like a low noose.
I tried to put aside the image of puppy Meg struggling with her head in that noose, unable to howl. It could have been her, not Monty. I would have gone home that day without our puppy.
Back at that clearing later, without the dogs, I found a pen that would have been used for rearing gamebirds, some feed bins, more snares, and alarmingly, some children’s toys. There were no warning signs, despite the woods being beside a public footpath.
It‘s strange how once you become aware of something you notice it all around. A couple of weeks later I heard of a family that lost their Springer Spaniel in the woods where they were walking. They found it too late, caught by the neck in a snare. More recently a colleague’s cat met a similar fate. Just the other week, I was playing in a music session in the pub, when a fellow musician told me how his friend’s Labrador had died in a snare.
But of course it‘s not just dogs and cats that are sentient beings. The target animals that these snares are set for suffer terribly. As do the non-target wildlife that get caught up in them. I don’t want to think about the suffering that is caused on a daily basis, it is too uncomfortable.
I feel guilty, every time I hear another snare story, that I’m not doing enough about it. I’ve seen what a snare does. But I do hope that more and more people will think about it - really think about it - so that our countryside will no longer be littered with these barbaric traps.