Country diary: ugly evidence of a criminal 'sport'

The warning signs first appeared last autumn on an estate five miles west, mounted on the kind of boards that might advertise a village fete. Two had been banged into the ground at the points where footpaths through woods spilled out into open farmland. Call the police if you see anything suspicious, they said.

Just before Christmas, the threat came closer; a gamekeeper on another estate three miles away told me he had confronted a gang of men. And now, in fields a 10-minute walk from home, where the shooting leaves of summer crops looked like a thinly sown lawn, we were being wagged at and licked by a rottweiler-mastiff cross. The dog’s big feet suggested the owner was not knowingly exaggerating when he said it was only half-grown.

Despite its boisterous affection, the dog had more gratifying things on its mind, the scent of blood in its nostrils. It was ducking and twisting, trying to nudge past us to a shape on the ground that we had found lying there minutes before.

In death, the hare had never looked more alive. Huge, yellow-rimmed black eyes gave me that hard, birdlike “I can see you” stare – the pupils looking back, as if at the last thing it had seen. The animal’s forelegs were stretched, ready to run. Its back legs were bent and cramped in the manner of a supreme athlete, hunched haunches betraying the piston power of limbs that could spring from ungainly to sprint in an instant. Its ears, though, looked oddly crimped, as if they were blackened leaves of corn on the cob, and its fur was wet through.

There was an absence of fur along its lower back and rump; instead a raw-red stain, which the dog was now sniffing. My wife caught its collar before its jaws made a grab for the hare’s bloodied flanks.

“Hare coursing,” said the dog’s owner. “It’s for the sport. They set lurchers on the hare then bet on which one kills it.”

The animal’s still-bright eyes and bloody wound suggested it had died early that morning or the night before. Not killed to be eaten but killed for killing’s sake. We took pictures, went home and called the police.