Tooth and Claw...

I was moved to add a comment on a recent Hooting Yard posting relating to weasels...
Having re-read it I can understand how many people might find it truly chilling...
I grew up in an isolated area of the Yorkshire dales on what, at one time, had been quite a grand country estate. It was populated by an odd collection of 'characters' including homicidal game-keepers, sinister gardeners, war maddened farm labourers and the tyrannical ex-colonial lords of the manor. Believe me when I say that, when I first saw it, Rawlinson End seemed like a documentary to me...
Death was everywhere and in plain view...
In the comment I made I described an incident from my childhood (I'd be about 4 years old) when a weasel entered a pheasant incubator, killed the chicken that was acting as a surrogate mother and the pheasant chicks she was raising. The game-keeper caught a weasel (I'm not sure it was the actual culprit), killed it and nailed it to a nearby fence..
The fences round about were covered in these sad little corpses the 'folk-lore' being that they served as a warning to others, a more cynical view might be that it demonstrated to the landowners that the game-keeper was doing his job...
The period after Christmas was especially disturbing. Animals that had been given as gifts were driven to the country and 'set free' having been found more of a commitment than the new owners were willing to deal with. Cats and dogs then joined the ranks of the crucified.
If there were no convenient fences the transgressors would be hung by lengths of string from the branches of trees. During my play-time wanderings I regularly bumped into crows and moles that suffered this fate...
As if all this wasn't horrific enough, the playground of the junior school I attended backed directly onto the holding area of the village butcher's abattoir. We gleeful infants would feed handfuls of grass to the cows, pigs and sheep held there and on our way home would hold our noses as we passed their stinking, fly covered skins draped over the walls alongside the road...
I wanted to write a conclusion to all this that would put some kind of perspective on it all...
I can't. They're facts of my life, the way things were...

(It will be understood why I chose not to add a picture to illustrate any of the above...)