Country Life
BY IAN NIALL Eviormtv the lady who wrote to me expressing horror at the country habit of destroying a brood of crows has never seen a feeble Iamb that has had its eyes pecked away, or the entrails of a maggot- infested sheep picked at by the same birds. I wonder, would she close her eyes to decapitated chicks in a hen-run where magpies and jackdaws, as well as crows, keep constant watch in order to kill? There are certain unalterable laws for survival. Some of them need not he applied by the town-dweller, who may congratulate himself on what he may call his humanity only as long as his country cousin remains a realist. All flesh is grass and grass itself is life, however sentimental one may choose to be about any part of the cycle. `To many of us it seems in- credible that such barbarity can persist in 1957—a hundred years ago or so it might have been ex- pected,' says my corresppndent. A hundred years ago the countryman was struggling to do what he is still trying to do now—feed his family and the hungry nation—and the crow remains as God created it, its destruction being part of the pattern of the use of tooth and claw, the sucking of blood by the stoat, the slow swallowing of a live mouse by a snake and the death. of a nestling falling from the eaves, The higher mind may not like to think so, but its existence is integrated with these elemental things.
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