A Very Unpleasant Occurrence, End of January, 2014

Not really commensurate with the kind of thing I normally put on my websites, but the two pictures shown above plus the two immediately below (I took well over three hundred altogether plus several videos) do at least help to illustrate the senseless and sickeningly awful demise of what had previously been a quite petite and fairly young sow Badger probably no more than two years old.

….If it actually is a bite…. Plus, the mystery of the missing ear! Despite the heavy all-night rain, Tess was still able to track outwards from the feeding site to the kill site and I’m fairly convinced that whatever it was that killed the little Muntjac, it did so by launching itself onto the back of its unsuspecting prey from the top of this twelve foot high slope at the edge of an open field. That’s a big jump….at least it would be for a Fox or a dog, even if jumping down on top of things happened to be their general MO…which it isn’t. Canids prefer to run things down, snapping and savaging at their prey as they go. Wolves, for example, are well known for biting junks out of prey as large as full-grown bison and literally eviscerating them on the hoof, so to speak!

No….I don’t think for one minute that a dog was responsible for this kill and certainly not a Fox. As for a human….Well, maybe….Possibly even probably….Except for one thing. If you’re going to go to all that trouble in some kind of pointless effort to fool people into thinking that there’s another large feline on the loose in an area already inundated with so-called ‘Big Cat’ sightings, then why hide the evidence away in a totally secluded place where nobody ever goes?

Nor do I think it was meant for me to find. It’s almost a year since I last visited this particular spot and I only went there this time on a spur of the moment decision.