Tails From Provence

The Special Post

There are two images from 2013 that will be forever engraved in my brain. Between them, they epitomise the depths to which animal abuse has sunk in Ireland. One of them was this – a foal standing over its mother’s body in Wicklow town.

The mare had refused to back out of a trailer, so her handlers left the ramp down and shot forward at speed, causing the mare to tumble out the open ramp. She lay on the road, unable to rise. It turned out she had two broken legs – no wonder she couldn’t get up. Did her handlers call a vet? No, they kicked and beat her, trying to force her up, eventually driving away, leaving her helpless on the road in the middle of a housing estate. The Gardai (police) and a vet were called and the mare was put to sleep. Rumour has it that witnesses are reluctant to come forward due to intimidation – I’m guessing that no-one will ever be charged with this crime.

The other image is this – a dog.

But this is no ordinary dog. This is a dog whose resilience and determination to live has earned him a place as the Poster Boy of Irish animal protection organisations. Meet Fionn, named after the legendary Irish warrior, Fionn MacCumhail.

The first I heard of Fionn was when I saw the above photo on a Facebook Event invitation from a long-time Cork friend, Oonagh. My heart just about cracked in two when I saw the shattered body and that defeated face and I started doing everything I could to learn about his story. The more I learned, the more coincidences I found – and the more I realised that I absolutely had to write this post.

Fionn was found a couple of days before Christmas, as near to death as any creature can be, buried in a heap of rubbish in the middle of a small wood just outside of Cork city. A woman was walking her dog through the woods and her dog sniffed out Fionn. The woman went to see what had caught her dog’s attention. All she could see was Fionn’s ears, sticking out of the rubbish heap, so deeply was he buried. She immediately called Cork Dog Action Welfare Group (DAWG), who sent someone out to investigate. After some digging, they finally managed to unearth the dog and he was rushed away for veterinary treatment.

Emaciated, semi-conscious, covered in wounds and sores, and with a temperature way below normal – his prognosis was not good. He was given antibiotics, painkillers, IV fluids and wrapped up warm and cosy. If he survived the night, the vets would carry out more tests the next day. Who knows how long he had fought to live, thrown away like a piece of garbage, but now he had others fighting for him, too – the veterinary staff and the volunteers at DAWG. His picture and the story of his rescue was posted on their Facebook page, and prompted outrage amongst animal lovers all over the world.

One of the people who heard his story was moved to do something about it and she set about organising a charity walk in Fionn’s name, via Facebook. Coincidence No 1 : this was my friend Oonagh, who I’ve known since she was a schoolgirl!

Oonagh received a huge response to her Event, Charity Dog Walk for Fionn. Appalled by the litany of abuse stories coming to light, animal lovers all over Ireland (and from further afield, too) seem to be delighted to have the opportunity to come along and just walk for animal welfare. It’s a show of solidarity for these creatures who have no voice, who are dependent on us to look after them and to fight for them when they are mistreated. At the moment, there are almost 900 people signed up to take part in the walk on Sunday 26th Jan and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they reach 1000. Well done Oonagh, and everyone who is taking part!

Fionn’s story continued to unfold over the next few days. He was clearly a type of hound and a tattoo on his ear revealed the identity of the club that owned him – Griffin United Harriers. In Cork, there are several small hunt clubs which keep hounds for hunting on foot or for drag-hunting competitions. Rather than keeping their hounds in kennels, they are farmed out to club members who feed, house and exercise them. Except, Fionn doesn’t look like he saw an awful lot of feed, does he?

Meanwhile, his wounds were cleaned and stitched up, he slowly started to eat again and totter around the Vet clinic. X-rays revealed a fractured skull, caused by a blow from a blunt instrument. A hammer? A hurley? A collision with a car? Who knows?

After a couple of days, he was well enough to go to a foster home and off he went, to spend his first Christmas as a family dog. All seemed well…

…and then he took a turn for the worse two days after Christmas. He seemed to have lost his vision and his coordination and he staggered around, confused and bewildered. Once again he was rushed to the vets, who quickly diagnosed swelling on the brain as a result of his fractured skull. Painkillers and anti-inflammatories were administered and Fionn’s legions of followers around the world held our breath, as we waited to hear if he survived the night.

And once again this plucky dog fought his way back from death’s door. Within days he was up on his feet again and starting to eat once more. But now there was an ominous cloud hanging over him. What was causing the swelling? Was the damage reparable or was Fionn condemned to a life a pain and confusion – in which case euthanasia would be the kindest thing.

DAWG pulled out all the stops for Fionn and arranged an MRI scan at a Dublin veterinary clinic. It was at this point that I decided to write this post, so I contacted J, a volunteer at DAWG, whose name Oonagh had given me. Her name didn’t ring any bells as I messaged her via Facebook, so I was surprised to receive a cheery “Hi Martine!” reply from her. It turned out that J had worked for our accountant in Cork several years ago and she remembered us well : coincidence no. 2! I told her that I wanted to write the story whatever the outcome of Fionn’s MRI. I felt that if I could do anything at all to highlight the animal abuse going on in our society, then I should do it. Anytime I had doubts about writing this, I just had to look at Fionn’s face in the very first picture and the doubts melted away. J had to check with the the board members of DAWG so that I would be allowed to use the photos – thankfully they said yes!

The next day, Fionn had his MRI scan. The results were not good. The blow to his head was so forceful that not only had his skull fractured, but one of the bony plates that make up the skull had shifted. This was what was causing the swelling. The choices were stark – euthanasia or high risk surgery.

His carers considered the horrors that Fionn had already endured – starvation, neglect, pain and abandonment. Would it be right to subject him to surgery and the inevitable post-op trauma and pain? Then they thought about how hard he had fought for his life ever since he had been dumped in the rubbish tip and they knew that they had to give him every possible chance to survive.

And survive he did. He’s back home with his foster family while he recovers from his surgery. His story has been told in all the Irish papers and he has appeared on the Irish TV News show.

He still has a long way to go before he fully recovers, but he has become a symbol of hope for animal rescue organisations across Ireland.

I want his story to galvanise the Irish public into action. It’s time to contact your elected representatives and say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. It’s time for legislation which will introduce much more severe penalties for animal abuse; it’s time to enforce existing legislation about compulsory microchipping of equines.

What do I expect my readers to do?

If you’re in the South of Ireland, you can put your walking shoes on and head to Cork on Sunday 26th to attend the Charity Dog Walk for Fionn (details here)

You could donate to the fund which has been created for the walk, you can donate to oonaghobrien@hotmail.com via PayPal .

You could send an email to Griffin United Harriers (herlipe1@gmail.com), asking them to contribute towards Fionn’s veterinary bills (they haven’t. not a penny) or you could ask them to prosecute the people who treated Fionn so cruelly.

At the very least, you can send an email to info@agriculture.gov.ie urging them to review existing anti-cruelty legislation and to introduce harsher penalties for convicted abusers.

Oh yes. There was a third coincidence in this story. It turns out that the lady who found Fionn in the middle of the woods was also an old friend of mine – we bonded over our children more than twenty years ago. Kay, you were an angel sent into the woods that day to rescue Fionn. Let’s hope that his story will be the start of a change in attitude towards animal abuse in Ireland.

Tags: animal abuse, animal welfare, cork, Ireland

Sanglier et Truffes

Wild Boar and Truffles

(If you’re vegetarian, vegan or just plain squeamish you might not want to read this post. You have been warned.)

Remember that list of planned posts I mentioned last week? The last day in La Ciotat, the SPECIAL one (it’s very special, I will do it next), the Pay it Forward one? Well, this isn’t one of those posts. This is the sort of post you write when you just have to blog about what’s happening right now. And it’s all because I was offered some sanglier (wild boar) meat.

Some hunters gave it to my friend MC, who texted me on Saturday night to see if I’d like some. Yes please! was my response. Real wild boar? One who lived a happy life in the forest and never saw a GM product or an antibiotic in its life? Deffo.

I was expecting a small piece. Enough to make one meal, maybe with leftovers as well.

I was not expecting a bin-bag that weighed a healthy 10kg. What is it? I asked. A shoulder and a leg, I was told. Ok, about a quarter of a sanglier?

When we started preparing the meat this evening, I realised that one shoulder (with ribs attached) and one leg (also with ribs attached) makes half a wild boar. This is what half a boar looks like.

We decided to prepare one joint for cooking immediately and to freeze the rest. We picked off any stray bristles, cut out one oddly coloured section of meat (a bruise, perhaps, or an old gunshot wound) and then the LSH set to work with our sharpest knife.

And that sucker was sharp. It sliced through bone like it was cutting cheese. In no time at all, there was a large chunk of leg marinating in our biggest pot. It will marinate for at least 24 hours, then I will cook it slowly as per the recipe MC gave me. I’ll let you know how it tastes!

Sanglier is incredibly meaty, much more than I expected. I was expecting lots of bone and gristle, but these animals are all muscle. This one joint will feed at least six people, if not eight. (Who shall we invite to dinner?)

The rest was cut up into meal-sized portions (where ‘meal-sized’ means it will feed a lot more people than the LSH and I). However, our freezer bags were too small for these portions, so there’s now four bin bags in the freezer, three with chunks for roasting and one with ribs which we will attempt to barbecue at a later stage. There’s also two normal-sized freezer bags full of chunks for stewing and there’s a pot of inedible bits stewing away happily to make stock as I type. This guy will keep us fed for quite some time.

Didn’t you mention truffles, too? I hear you say. Why yes. Yes I did.

MC’s husband had left the bin-bag containing half a sanglier in my jeep while I rode on Sunday. When I’d finished riding, I headed over and opened the door. As you do, when you’re about to drive home.

WHOA! What the f*** is that smell?

Had the sanglier gone off already?

Wait, what’s that on the driver’s seat?

A Christmas cracker shaped piece of tin-foil! Mystified, I started to unravel it – and burst out laughing (yeah, there by myself, crazy lady laughing in the car) as the pungency of the smell quadrupled.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but Alexandrine’s dog Chips is trained as both a hunting dog and as a truffle hound. Not only that, but Alexandrine and her copain Rémy have a small plantation of truffled oaks right beside my horses’ field. She gave me a little present of truffles to go along with the sanglier (and to add to the authentic Provençal air Ole Jeepy is rapidly acquiring).

So now there’s one of these safely stowed in the fridge…

and there’s another one busy turning these eggs into truffled eggs.

I don’t have much experience with truffles but I’m happy to learn!

I ♥ my new friends!!

Tags: truffles, wild boar

Too Much to Say!

I’ve been finding hard to get into the Blogging Groove for the last week. I have no idea why – I have loads to write about, too much, maybe. I’ve been thinking “I’ll write the last post about New Years in La Ciotat. No, I’d rather write about the horses. Hang on, I’ll do that special post I’m planning. Wait, I have to say something about the Pay it Forward thing I signed up for last year.” Anyone else have conversations like this with themselves?

I came to the conclusion that the easiest thing to write about at this moment is the horses, so here’s a horse update. Hopefully writing this will help me get my Blogger Mojo going again.

Ah my boys…

We took a break over the holiday season, apart from a couple of little solo hacks, and then lengthened that to cover the weekend after New Year as well, because the weather was ICKY. Cold and windy. Where’s the fun in that, I asked myself. But I had arranged the first lesson of the new year with Alexandrine for Tuesday, so on Monday I was thankful to see that the wind had died down and I headed up to do some work with Aero. I didn’t have much time, as we had spent the morning at Forcalquier market and I decided to run through our travail sur sol stuff, figure out where his brain was and ride him afterwards if he was in sensible form. Well, it turned out he was so focussed, so responsive and so attentive with the travail sur sol that I felt that I had to finish after thirty minutes of it. He deserved a reward and confirmation that he’s a super-good boy. To ride him would have been the wrong thing.

Next morning, I was heading up for my lesson and I knew I’d ride Aero. Sure, he’d hadn’t been ridden in two weeks, but I knew his head was in the right place. What a lesson we had… I started off with our usual warm-up in walk, trying to get him to stretch and bend through the turns. We moved onto leg-yielding in walk, then in trot. Down the centre line, leg-yield to the track. It’s almost spot-on, there’s just slight tweaking to be done from time to time, capturing the outside shoulder or pushing his quarters a little further over. Then we moved on to shoulder-in and worked on my problems with it! Asking for too much, hanging on to the inside rein, crossing the inside hand over the withers… that sort of stuff. Before we knew it, we were doing shoulder-in halfway down the long side, riding a 10 metre circle and doing shoulder-out for the second half of the long side. By the end of the lesson, his trot was soft and round. Still bouncy, but I really felt I was ‘with him’. We didn’t do any canter work. Again, I felt he’d been so good for 55 minutes that to throw in five minutes of cantering at the end just for the sake of it would have been wrong. Next week, I’m riding Aero in my lesson again and we’re doing more of the same. We’re also going to run through the Club 2 Grand Prix test. It’s got leg-yielding and canter loops. No prob!

Wednesday was Flurry’s turn. We’ll go for a nice ride in the woods, I thought. Wednesday is not a hunting day, so I didn’t wear my bright orange gilet. Funny though… I could hear dogs barking in the woods. They couldn’t be hunters though… not on a Wednesday… hunting days are Sunday, Monday, Thursday and Saturday around here.

So we rode along a trail towards an intersection, listening to the dogs barking furiously off to our left and hearing occasional jingles from the bells attached to their collars. They really sound like hunting dogs, I thought. Let’s do a right-handed loop, just to be on the safe side. So we headed right, through a field of Clear Thinking (Clary Sage!) and as we approached the far end, what do we see but a guy all decked out in orange, carrying a gun, strolling up the other side of the field. Shit, I thought, looks like the hunters are in the woods… I called out to him and asked him was it dangerous and he assured me that it wasn’t. Well, he was going in the opposite direction to me and the hounds were still off to the left and behind me at this stage, so I thought yeah grand it’ll be fine.

Heading out

We plodded along, Flurry was in grand form and we had a couple of trots and a canter. Then as we were making our way down another trail, he stopped, looking to the left, ears sharply pricked. We sat and waited, then I heard rustling in the trees to our left, followed by ta-ta-dum-ta-ta-dum-ta-ta-dum-ta-ta-dum as a smallish wild boar came cantering steadily through the trees and across the trail, not thirty metres away from us. RUN LITTLE BOAR RUN… I think Flurry had the same thought as me! (This incident answered the long-asked question of what will Flurry do if we meet a wild boar on the trail. Stand and watch it, is the answer)

Now what to do… were the hounds about to come baying and howling through the trees? I could still hear them; they seemed to be still far away. And that hunter was still far away behind me… yes, going ahead seemed the sensible thing to do. So we did. And all was fine, except the hounds kept getting closer and closer and I felt distinctly uncomfortable as we trotted along a seldom used trail, feeling that a hunter on the opposite hill might just see a flash of movement and let rip.

Feeling pretty exposed right about here

Finally, we emerged into the last Field of Clear Thinking before the last climb to the farm. What did we see? Two more hunters, guns at the ready, waiting for something to emerge from the trees on the other side of the field. Eh yeah, that would be me…

Anyway, we survived. I have to say that all the hunters we passed were shifty-eyed and non-communicative. For example, in that last field, as we approached the first hunter, I smiled and asked if he had killed anything (which is probably not the right way to put it, but hey, I’m a foreigner). No, no, he replied. Um yeah… what about that pool of blood I passed twenty metres back, and the furrow dug in the ground where a carcass had been dragged along? So I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t have been hunting. But giving them the benefit of the doubt, it’s the last week of the season, maybe the game quotas haven’t been met and they were given permission to hunt an extra day. Maybe.

One more brief horse story from the week… I had arranged to meet MC on Friday morning. She would ride up from Reillanne and I would ride down to meet her. The point where we usually meet is about 45 minutes away from the farm. Normally I ride Flurry for these longer ‘solos’, I just haven’t had the confidence to do it with Aero. This week, I knew it would be ok with Aero, and it was. Thankfully there were no hunters around – that might have tested our newly found confidence! – and we strolled along, calm and self-assured all the way, met MC and Quieto and strolled happily home again.

Distant Alps through Aero’s ears

I have turned a massive corner with Aero. Sure, he will always be liable to get much more worked up than Flurry, but I’ve ridden through what I think (hope!) is the worst he’ll do and I know I can cope. He’s turned a corner with me, too. I think the travail sur sol has helped enormously to build his confidence and trust in me.

2014 is looking like the Year of the Horse in more ways than one.