“D’YOU WANT to see a lion?” This thrilling question was asked of my brother and me, aged probably about four and six, by West Norfolk huntsman Ian Higgs when we’d dropped into kennels with our father. We nodded frantically, our eyes wide. Higgs opened the freezer and there it was: a dead lion, in all his full-maned glory. He had escaped from a zoo somewhere and so had been shot. Goodness knows how the lion ended up at the West Norfolk kennels, or whether or not he was fed to the hounds, but there he was to the utter delight of any passing small children.
Nothing so exotic occurred at my parents’ own kennels, those of their Norfolk Beagles. Hounds were fed on ‘bibles’ – the third stomach of a cow – but any hunt flesh-house holds an unending fascination for children, who are usually much more matter-of-fact about the cycle of life and death than their parents. No child who grows up in kennels will ever be ignorant about where the meat on their plate comes from, nor will they often have reason to whine “I’m bored”. There are
