Jolyon Maugham lets slip

I do feel there is another (albeit not bludgeoned to death) victim here. Is Claire happy to have her kimono commandeered for fox chasing/beating to a pulp purposes?
Because I'd be bloody furious.
Why didn't she assert ownership of the kimono with a firm "don't you dare do that again" back in November?
Or make a loaded hint with a gift of a silk dressing gown for Christmas?

So many questions.....

@JolyonsChickensAreBigots

YANBU.

Oh Excelpope is excellent, always good to see his take on it. thank you for that.

AIBU to say I'm enjoying not exactly sad to see the bully get a taste of his own medicine?

No worries, I'm just coming to this new from the Christmas black-out.

This comment from the thread above is so awesome I'll be unpicking it for some time:

mobile.twitter.com/ExcelPope/status/1210150111722049536

Sorry nauticant, I may have stepped on your point somewhat. I just wanted to express what I feel about people who kill wild animals for anything other than genuine mercy killing.They disgust me.

Jolyon, I hate you for what you did. There, I said it. You bludgeoned a trapped wild animal to death. I hate you. And so do most people now.

In terms of the sides of history, why is the wrong side represented in the main by level-headed women while the right side has people who threaten violence, fetishists, and people like Jolyon Maugham who make a decent job of passing for normal to start with but end up looking like they might have more in common with the Jess Bradleys, Challenors, etc.

Imagine if Jolyon had said "Just freed a fox from the netting in my garden. How's your boxing day going?"

There would have been majorly different responses. Think on that Jolyon, and don't bludgeon the wildlife. And get a proper henhouse.

Wow - that stag video - amazing. Compassion and bravery indeed. Take note Jolyon! Men who respect the wildlife. Much better men than you.

My friend keeps chickens - she has a fantastic fox-proof coup. Get one of those Jolyon, please - available online - and stop being a fox-bludgeoning barbaric twat. Thank you. What you did, Jolyon, makes me feel sick.

I wonder if his bat looks like these....

I agree heathspeedwell. I have a very secure run. I have had a few hens taken when roaming round my cottage garden, but this has been rare as they are usually in the run, or I am in the garden with them. Nothing can get entangled by my run, we have foxes, badgers, and hedgehogs coming in, safe chickens, and safe wildlife.

Looks like it...!

I suspect that there are thousands of people like me in the UK who keep chickens and wouldn't dream of owning a gun. I've kept rescue hens for over 15 years and I write about it for the national press, so I have read a lot of messages from other hen keepers.

I get foxes playing in my garden every night. I enjoy watching them. I never worry that they could harm my hens because, like every other sensible owner, I know my coop is fox-proof.

I genuinely can't understand how a wealthy and relatively intelligent man could be so negligent as to have a run so badly-secured that a fox could become trapped. Clearly if a fox could be trapped, then his hens and his neighbours' cats and dogs were all equally vulnerable.

Would he have clubbed all of them to death if they were trapped?

Twitter - Foxes that identify as chickens are more likely to be the victims of violence…as Jolyon has demonstrated.

Oh, of course. That's surely something you would not even think of unless the poor creature was really badly mangled, ie car. Not just bleeding a little, or inconvenient. But there are people asking why he didn't shoot it if it needed to die, and it is because he is not at his fancy country home

The fox in the hen house... oh the blessed irony...!

The comments made me laugh:

mobile.twitter.com/ExcelPope/status/1210130684150534144

I have seen that video before, and yes! Talk about bravery and compassion! Those men could have easily been injured or worse by those stags, and instead they (very, very carefully) cut them loose.

And to Tocopherol, yup, shooting the fox wouldn't have been much better received, but I agree with FannyCann that beating an animal to death with a bat is exceptionally repugnant. It's an up-close and, indeed, visceral method of killing. Posting it on social media is beyond my understanding.

lydiamajora you said you were in USA? I think these guys are in USA. Who needs a gun or a baseball bat?

Full marks for taking great personal risk to free the deer. Shows JollyTallyHo for the complete cowardly idiot he is.

Also, there really is something particularly horrible about bludgeoning an animal to death. A friend's farmer husband decided to put the guinea pig out of its misery (and save on a vet bill, very farmer behaviour) ...so he shot it with his shotgun. Suffice to say there wasn't much left to bury and he's lucky not to have been divorced. But I now feel he deserves a small vote in his favour for choosing a less visceral way of despatching it and not smashing it to pieces with a baseball bat.

He hasn't answered anyone on Twitter asking that.

Yes I did wonder that. A fox is so like a dog after all, what is he found a cat after his hens... a man who goes to the hen house armed with a baseball bat obviously intends to use it, as it is hardly a deterrent to an animal.

Dogs can get paws caught in nylon netting, as can other animals, so I am assuming the fox was scrabbling to get away and became entrapped.

I wonder if he'd have done the same if it had been a dog he'd found there, or a cat.

Dogs can get paws caught in nylon netting, as can other animals, so I am assuming the fox was scrabbling to get away and became entrapped. Or it could have caught a paw in chicken wire mesh, as nylon netting is not at all suitable for protection from foxes, only to contain hens temporarily in one area of the garden. I would never use it as it can cause problems for wildlife. Anyway either of these things just needed snipping away to free the animal. I
He must have a very strange set up if he caught a fox like that, maybe he had set some kind of trap ?

Lydiamajora, he would probably have had just as much hassle if he'd shot this fox as the incident occurred in a central London garden!

It's not that normal to catch a fox in netting - surely most people know foxes can bite through it? And of it's loose enough to snag something that big it's loose enough to get under.

Excellent, thanks again Betty.