George East's Blog

Animal Magic

Two of our hens have gone off lay, and the response from Breton friends and neighbours has been predictably true-to-type.

When he arrived on his daily visit to check out what townie/Brit madness we have been up to, old Alain said this was a signal that it was time to start eating our chickens rather than just  their eggs. If we were too busy (which was code for ‘If you are too squeamish’) It would take no more than a minute for him  to stretch the selected necks. If we were unfamiliar with the simple but delicious classic country dish poule au pot (code for ‘As you are British and thus not able to boil and egg properly’), he would be only too pleased to do the cooking and invite us over for dinner.

When my wife huffily explained that she had no wish to  have her beloved Blanche foully murdered, let alone attend a dinner at which she was on the menu, our neighbor went into overdrive with his pantomime  puffing-out-of-cheeks-rolling-of-eyes- removal –of-cap-and-scratching-of-head-before-a-final-exasperated-sigh routine. He then favoured us with his standard parting expression of  pity mixed with incredulity, and  stomped off to tell  Jean-Yves about our latest demonstration of Martian-like behavior.

His departure was followed   by the arrival of our friend  Little Georges,  who owns an entire  hamlet on the other side of the mountain which his wife keeps fully  inhabited with more varieties and numbers  of animals than trooped up the gangplank of  Noah’s Ark.  They are also the only couple we know to own a bull called Lulu. 

Though not much taller than our largest hen, Georges  is another stereotype and comes straight from Central Casting as the alpha male French countryman who lives in an uncomplicated world where the male is the dominant species and any problems with the female of any species can be solved by a good rogering.

Thus it came as no surprise to learn that Georges’ solution was not to kill and eat our hens, but to get a rooster in. Having a hen house with no male chicken to keep the inmates in order was asking for trouble, he said, and became so excited at the prospect of a sorting out our temporary problem that I thought he was going to offer to do the job on Blanche and Whitney personally.

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Jean Yves was not wearing his hearing aids when we met in the lane after lunch, so our conversation was limited to a mixture of  me yelling in  bad French,  worse Breton and mediocre English, and both of us using  universal sign language. When we had exchanged greetings, Jean said he had heard about our egg laying problems but did not think we should  put a rooster in with the hens.  When I asked why, he said that the crowing of a cockerel was the surest sign to Mr Renard  that chickens were in the area. He knew about my arrangement with the fox family in the forest that I would feed them and they would not feed off our hens, but he feared any advertising by a cockerel might cause them to break our one-sided contract.

As we talked, Jean-Yves saw me watching Milly crouching on the verge, and asked why I always paid such keen attention to our dog having a bowel motion. I explained that, when Donella was not walking with us, she liked a full report on the texture, colour, consistency and overall appearance of Milly’s stools. As he leaned forward and cupped his hand around his ear as if fearing  he had misheard and misunderstood me, I said that Milly cannot tell us how she is feeling, and studying her poo was a good way to check she was in good health. I realised that it might seem a little over-obsessive, but we were not as bad as a British couple in the next village. Because the wife suffers with her legs and is unable to walk the dog, her husband not only reports on the condition of their eight dogs’ poo, but takes advantage of the latest digital technology by filming it. When he returns, it is a simple matte to plug the camera into their wide-screen television so they can study the evidence together over breakfast. Another advantage of transferring the film to the big screen is that they can show the footage to other dog-loving visitors.

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Underlining our ambivalent attitudes towards the animals we keep or eat, I got a panicky e-mail this morning from a friend who lives in Normandy and says she is in a sticky and potentially very bloody situation. She and her husband decided recently to share the cost of a whole pig with another pair of expats. It works out far cheaper by buying gros, as the French would say, and the meat will be really fresh as the animal will be slaughtered to order.

But there is a problem. Tradition in her corner of France demands that one member  of the buying syndicate has to attend the ritual  stunning, hanging, killing, bleeding, disembowelling and dismemberment of the pig. As the husbands have done the unmanly thing and refused to volunteer, the two couples have agreed to draw straws to select the execution witness. Although my correspondent says she is a committed carnivore and hopefully not a hypocrite, she cannot stand the thought of watching the animal’s death throes. It is strange how so many enthusiastic meat eaters (including me) do not want to be reminded of where the piece of meat on our plate began its journey. I will write back and suggest that the lady either pulls out of the deal, bullies her husband into volunteering, or quite simply cheats by ensuring that she is in charge of the draw - and therefore who will end up with the short straw.