Pests And Their Extermination Down The Ages (16 September 1977)

I recently returned home after three or four days’ absence and found ants having a high old time in the kitchen cabinet.  The attraction was just two boiled sweets which I had forgotten were in there.  I never mind the old insect or two, but there were hundreds of these things.  Fortunately, there is a way of dealing with ants.

You attack them at the nest with boiling water, no matter how far afield they are ranging.   The nest was under the front doorstep, from whence the ants were moving under the edge of the hall runner to the kitchen.

Three or four pans of boiling water down the nest did the trick.

I haven’t seen an ant since.  But what puzzles me is what happened to all the ants that were still in the house when the dolloping took place outside.  Did they all make their way back to the nest and voluntarily drown themselves, or what?

Down the ages, pests have come in various forms.  And some animals have been dubbed pests which have been nothing of the kind, thus adversely affecting the balance of nature.  The classic case was the Great Plague of 1665, which killed one third of the population of Fenny and more at Newport Pagnell.

It was thought the disease was carried by cats and dogs, and they were ordered to be destroyed.  But the disease was the bubonic plague, and scientists later discovered that its prime transmitters to human beings were lice carried by brown rats.  So killing off dogs and cats had destroyed the very animals which could have most helped to keep the rats down.

Up to about 150 years ago, the destruction of pests was one of the civic responsibilities of churchwardens.  Locally, some of their account books have come down to us.  In them are frequent references to sums paid for the destruction of animals and birds which were deemed harmful to farming, gardening, fishing and poultry-keeping – notably sparrows, hedgehogs, moles, polecats, weasels, badgers, otters, stoats and foxes.  No notice seems to have been taken of the greatest culprits, rats and mice, which some of those other creatures could have kept in check.

Sparrows were destroyed in very large numbers.  The payment was usually 2d a dozen, but at Newton Longville in 1780 the churchwarden reports that he began paying 3d a dozen for them.  At Milton Keynes sparrows were paid for right up to 1879, which was long after payments for other pests had ceased.

Pigeons seem to have been ignored.  Possibly, when caught, they went straight into the pot.  Sparrows also went into sparrow pies, but that apparently was not enough to keep their numbers down.

Some villages had professional mole-catchers.  Woughton had a highly successful one in John Hedge, who died in 1893, aged 87.  He was a cripple and walked with crutches, but his services were in demand over a wide area.  A shilling a dozen was the usual payment for moles.

Hedgehogs we now know to be among agriculture’s best friends as destroyers of vast numbers of insects and other noxious creatures, but at one time they fetched 4d apiece for adults and 2d for young ones.  Among other crimes, they were alleged to suck the milk of recumbent cows during the night!

Three curious entries at Newton in the 1690’s refer to the payment of 4d each for “wildcats.”  But a real wildcat is a most dangerous animal, and the reward for its capture would certainly have been much higher than was paid for a hedgehog.  They must have been either polecats or domestic cats run wild.

Not to be doubted is the payment of 1s each for foxes.  All the local accounts refer to them frequently and they seem to have been especially numerous at Newton.

We can talk as we like about the rights and wrongs of various ways of killing foxes, but there is no doubt it is a most destructive creature.  It seems to kill for the sake of killing.   A farmer-cum-poultryman out Horwood way once called me to see the havoc wrought by a fox in his henpen the previous night.  It was a horrifying sight.  About a score of fully-grown birds lay around with their heads more or less bitten off.

Just one bird would have been enough for a fox family dinner.  It was not the only time I have seen such destruction wrought by foxes.  I could only compare it with the results of stray dogs harrying sheep, which I have also been invited to witness.  Yet foxes probably help to keep down wild rabbits.

The accounts do not mention rabbits, as far as I know.  Possibly because, like pigeons, they went into the pot.  The history of the rabbit is obscure.  They do not seem to have been natives of these islands.  They were in England in the 12^th century, but they were not known in Scotland until 150 to 200 years ago.

I remember, after the second world war, Bletchley farmers and allotment holders being very concerned about the ever-increasing numbers of rabbits and the damage they were causing.  Relief came in a very unpleasant form – the disease called myxomatosis.

This practically wiped them out.  You could not go along a country road without seeing horribly deformed and festering creatures either just dragging themselves about or lying dead of the disease.  I used to enjoy rabbit pie, but ever since then I haven’t been able to look a rabbit in the face.