How to cope with animal crises | Tom Cox

I'd just walked past the sign for the abstraction borehole at Lover's Lane near Garboldisham when I saw the escaped turkey and the woman coming towards me on the horse. She was riding one-handed, clutching her mobile phone to her ear. "Oh, a man's here," she said into it. "He'll help me get her back in the field."

This is a problem I often find, being hairy and out in the countryside, especially at times when my beard has got to the stage where it is not so much a beard as a handy recession scarf: people often assume that the hairiness denotes some kind of ruggedly practical nature. "That facial hair must be a signifier of that bloke's capability to handle a minor farming crisis," they will decide, rather than something more accurate, such as "That facial hair is a signifier of its owner's need for warmth and his love for the band Traffic around the indisputable high point of their bucolic folk-funk 1970 LP John Barleycorn Must Die."

In the event, I did pretty well with the turkey, especially as I was still a little dazed from trying to work out what an abstraction borehole might be. That is to say, I held it for a moment, without crying or shouting "BOLLOCKS! IT'S A LIVE TURKEY! IN MY ACTUAL ARMS!", then looked after its owner's horse while she popped the bird back over the fence into the field where it lived.

She introduced herself as Georgie. "I haven't seen you around here before," she said. One reason she hadn't seen me around there before was due to the fact I live several miles from Garboldisham, none of the walks in my Norfolk walking books are located there and in the past I have been scared to do Norfolk walks that are not in my Norfolk walking books, because I fear change.

Today had been different, though. I'd boldly spread out my OS Map on the carpet and plotted my very own circular nine-mile ramble. I'd chosen Garboldisham because the previous day I'd bought a lovely secondhand folklore guide called Gothick Norfolk for two quid and it had told me that the Iceni Queen Boudicca's grave was located there. Additionally, it had a ditch called "Devil's Ditch" and, as I live my entire outdoor life under the delusion that I am directing my own low budget folk horror film, I am hopelessly attracted to any topographical feature containing the word "devil".

"My husband and I are going onion picking in a moment," said Georgie. "Do you want to come?" Ten minutes later, after being introduced to two overweight sheep, some bantam hens and a pair of Belgian hares called Athena and Hannibal, I was bouncing along on the back of a tractor driven by Georgie's other half, Richard, past the abstraction borehole and deep into the forest.

Upon getting home, having finished my walk in the dark, I couldn't help feeling that the adventure had been a direct result of plotting my own route through the wilderness. Without a walking guide, you might not find the resting place of a rebel queen from AD60, as you'd intended, but you could end up rescuing a relative of the grouse species and going onion picking with some strangers.

I felt refreshed, inspired by Georgie and Richard's Good Life existence - apparently they're know as "Tom and Barbara" in the village - and the serendipity of the encounter, but a hint of sadness too, left there by a sight I'd seen as we bumped away from Georgie and Richard's place on the tractor: another turkey, alone, limping desperately along, which Georgie had told me, quite matter-of-factly, had been injured, perhaps by one of its peers jumping on its back, and might have to be put down.

As much as I like the idea of keeping animals and living off the land, I doubt my ability to cope in this sort of situation. That morning I'd spent a full nine minutes trying to rescue a spider from the bath, then read a scene about a dying lamb in the latest TC Boyle novel that had reduced me to a globule of human jelly. After this, I'd disposed of a the back half of a vole that had been slaughtered by my cat Shipley.

My cats did go through a phase earlier this year where it looked like they'd stopped killing rodents and brought them into the house purely because they, well, liked having them around the place, but this has passed. Barely a day goes by where I don't have to clean up a mouse's face from outside the spare room. "Bring some slippers!" I tell overnight guests. "Why's that?" they answer. "It's just getting quite cold right now, and I worry about you," I reply, attempting to sound sincere.

Fortunately, only two of my cats are killers. The oldest one, who is 17, is a pacifist intellectual who associates violence with the populist side of British life that he abhors, and my kitten is too young to disembowel a shrew. She can't even miaow properly yet. I know this because the other day I asked her "Have you learned to meow properly yet?" and she replied firmly in negative, by saying "Eweheewah".

I'm also lucky that my cats tend to stick, on the whole, to rodents these days, and small ones at that. There's a fine line between living and dying when you're a vole: voles and small mice will peg out quickly, once seriously injured, and don't look accusingly into your eyes as they breathe their last. Unlike, say, a particular pregnant rat from 2005 whose forlorn face will forever remain etched on my mind like a deeply hurtful social faux pas. And that was just a rat. I don't want to be sizeist about this, but there is no doubt that, as an animal gets bigger, its pain gets that bit more palpable, that bit closer to human emotion.

I know from past evidence that I'm a wreck when dealing with a dying cat, so how would I deal with a critically ill sheep, cow or goat? I'm still thinking about that turkey now, and it wasn't even mine. You could argue that, as with voles, in time I'd become more implacable about the suffering, but I doubt it. And I think this is why, despite my ambitions to be surrounded by all manner of animals, and the fact that I am far more of a country person than a city person, I'll probably continue to be a tourist in the more hardcore rustic world.

I'll go on long walks alone off the beaten track, come close to getting stranded in forests at nightfall, I'll walk past a smallholding and say hello to a sheep or horse in a fake posh voice, even make a hamfisted attempt to help the owners rescue their turkey, and secretly name it "Big Gillian" or "Sebastian", but I won't quite be inspired to follow in their footsteps. When all is said and done, I'll retreat to my safety zone, with its more minor animal crises, where I can just about cope.

? Read more animal stories in Tom Cox's latest book, Talk to the Tail. Follow him on Twitter @cox_tom.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/oct/15/how-to-cope-with-animal-crises

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