Animal Rights Concerns

Bad Hare Days

Author: John Fitzgerald
ISBN-nr: 4294967295
Category: Wildlife and Hunting
added by John Fitzgerald

Hi, I've referred to this book of mine, Bad Hare Days, elsewhere on the site, and am now posting the following review of the book with the permission of the reviewer... Dublin, Ireland-based writer Chris Morris.

Kind regards to all activists and campaigners. John Fitzgerald

Chris Morris's review of Bad Hare Days 

John Fitzgerald is an Irish freelance journalist and an avid campaigner against blood sports and is well known especially throughout Ireland for his stance on the cruel "sport" of hare-coursing

Bad Hare Days opens with the fourteen year old Fitzgerald walking through the “church field”, enjoying a break from his studies, when he hears loud voices in the distance.

Curious to find out what is happening, he walks in the direction of the voices and sees a group of men and boys combing the church field…“like I’d seen on television when they are searching for a missing person”. When he gets closer to the group he feels un-nerved by the expressions on their faces.
 
Fitzgerald takes refuge in an abandoned church in the “church field” and looks through the fuchsia bush that covers the opening, where one imagines there was once a Harry Clarke religious stained glass window. Hysterical voices echo around the old church as he watches the leader of the group holding aloft a badly injured hare.

The leader passes the trembling hare to a boy, around the same age as Fitzgerald, and tells him to “stiff” it. When the boy fails to kill the hare the leader snatches it from him and proceeds to batter the hare against the church wall…“in a mounting frenzy of excitement until another man taps him on the shoulder and tells him it’s dead now you’re ok.”

When the group, led by their alcohol-swigging leader, walk off with the dead hare, Fitzgerald examines the scene and sees the hare’s blood splashed on the church wall and on blades of grass.

The image of the blood on blades of grass reminds one of the poem: I see his blood upon the Rose, composed by the Irish Roman Catholic poet, Joseph Mary Plunkett (1887-1916). One is also reminded of St Francis of Assai who loved and revered birds, bees and all of the animal kingdom. On the feast of St Francis, adults and children bring their pets to be blessed by the priest at a special mass.

As he walks home, shaken by what he experienced, Fitzgerald meets an old man and tells him what he had witnessed in the church field. The old man advises him: “You’ll say nothing, not a word. You’ll only get yourself into trouble.”

When he leaves school and starts work, still haunted by the memories of what he witnessed in the church field when he was fourteen years old, Fitzgerald starts to write letters to the national papers, highlighting the cruelty of hare-coursing. 

One day the parish priest, Fr. Aloysius, visits Fitzgerald in his place of work and asks him to stop writing letters to the papers.  He tells Fitzgerald his letters have caused great distress to Fr. Carrigan, who had been a curate in the parish for many years.

Fr Carrigan, Fitzgerald reminds the reader, used the pulpit at Sunday mass to appeal for volunteers to help in the netting of hares: “He would follow the final blessing with a favourable reference to hare-coursing or a rallying call.”

One would be forgiven for thinking Fr Aloysius’ visit to Fitzgerald’s place of work on that day was a kind of warm up act because within an hour a man smelling of whiskey enters Fitzgerald’s place of work. He verbally abuses Fitzgerald and then physically attacks him for writing letters to the papers about hare-coursing.

This does not deter Fitzgerald. If anything, it makes him more determined: besides writing to the national papers, he goes on local and national radio highlighting hare-coursing as a barbaric form of entertainment.

Early one morning there is a loud knock on Fitzgerald’s front door: “Standing on the footpath outside the door were five tall men in suits. They looked like men dressed up for a wedding.”

The leader of the men introduces himself as Detective Sergeant Michael McEvoy of the Garda Special Branch:  “…We’re here to search this kip”, he said, as he pushed his way into the house. The Special Branch men raided the house and when they found a leaflet from the Animal liberation Front, McEvoy chortled “Hip hip! We’ve nailed the fucker!”

Fitzgerald gives a graphic account of his arrest and interrogation. McEvoy and Garda Collier sit behind a desk in the barren investigation room and Fitzgerald is ordered to sit on a high stool. From time to time, McEvoy circles around Fitzgerald using all kinds of threats to try and extract a confession from him.

One sees Fitzgerald in the same terrifying environment as the hare caught in the net in the church field. McEvoy tells Fitzgerald, as he is about to take his fingerprints, “I can break every one of your fingers if you don’t co-operate.”

McEvoy continues to circle Fitzgerald trying to get him to sign a false confession. When he refuses to sign the already prepared statement, McEvoy tells Fitzgerald he will have his very ill father brought down to the station and interrogated. It is this threat that breaks the strong willed Fitzgerald and he signs the false confession.

Within three months Fitzgerald is arrested for the second time. This time the Special Branch’s interrogation tactics don’t have the same terrifying effects on him. Though he is held in Garda custody for forty-eight hours, the Special Branch fail to break him down or frighten him into signing a false confession, so they take him to court, using the original signed “confession” as evidence.

Fitzgerald describes how the jury is selected for his trial; this in itself makes interesting reading.  The jury try to restrain their giggles as the prosecuting barrister, “…in his refined, Anglo-Irish accent…” reads aloud to the court the foul language and obscene expletives from a letter Fitzgerald is accused of writing to members of the hare-coursing fraternity. 

This court scene’s dark comedy lends light relief to an otherwise tragic, gruesome story.

Fitzgerald goes to the funeral mass for Masher Whelan; leader of the group in the church field on the day the fourteen year-old Fitzgerald witnessed the brutal killing of the hare.

Having read of the brutality this man acted out on vulnerable helpless creatures, I can’t help thinking a more appropriate name for him would have been “Basher” Whelan.

When five priests and two cannons parade from the sacristy to the altar, “…someone in the congregation joked that the big guns had been wheeled in to give Masher a mighty send off…”

As he watches the altar boy swinging the thurible of incense over the coffin, Fitzgerald gets flashbacks to that time in the church field when he watched Masher Whelan swinging the helpless, terrified hare and bashing it against the abandoned church wall.

This is a splendidly crafted work. Fitzgerald’s writing skill captures the reader’s attention in the way he describes, in vivid imagery, each event as though it is happening as one reads. 

The religious imagery in the opening chapter is all the more daunting when one remembers that the abandoned church in the church field was once a sacred building.

This abandoned church once displayed the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, symbolised by the lighted sanctuary lamp.

It is to be hoped this memoir will inspire its readers to do what they can to have hare coursing outlawed in Ireland: a land of breathless beauty…and dark shadows of obscene cruelty to animals?

Though the names in this memoir have been changed, nonetheless this does not detract from its authenticity.

Bad Hare days is published by Olympia Publishers in the UK and is available from Amazon.com or on order from bookshops. It has 397 pages. It costs £9.99 sterling or E12.99.

- Chris Morris

...end of review...