222 WIRE NETTING 



obnoxious substance. With these precautions, trees and shrubs 

 may be got up on the residential portions of estates where ground 

 game exists in considerable number, continuing the fencing for 

 a period of from seven to ten years after planting. Even at the 

 expiration of the time named it may be necessary to protect the 

 stems of shrubs with wire-netting, as rabbits trim oft branches 

 as high as they can reach, and in other cases applying a protective 

 substance. 



For farms, fields, nurseries, fruit plantations, market and private 

 gardens, pleasure grounds, belts, clumps and plantations, -good 

 fencing with wire-netting must be adopted if hares and rabbits 

 are to be excluded, and it is a moot question whether the pro- 

 prietors of coverts should bound them by ground game proof wire- 

 netting, or foresters, farmers and gardeners be under the necessity 

 of protecting their crops against hares and rabbits. The former 

 implies the hare-park and rabbit-warren, and the degradation of 

 coursing, beagling, and shooting to the level of tame deer-hunting 

 and rabbit -coursing, against which humanitarians are dead-set : 

 and the latter relief from the depredations of ground game with- 

 out expense on their part in keeping it at bay or even down. As 

 bearing on these points, we may mention that in cutting eleven 

 acres of wheat at Lenton, Lincolnshire, over 100 rabbits, three 

 foxes, and several pheasants were disturbed : and that in Devon 

 farmers found rabbits so numerous and committing so much 

 damage two acres of corn having been eaten right away at 

 Cullompton as to have recourse to killing and hawking them 

 about the villages at the low price of 3^. each. In the Lincolnshire 

 case, it is clear that ground game and pheasants may live where 

 there are foxes, and thus both shooting and fox-hunting may be 

 indulged in : while in the Devon instance, in which no mention 

 is made of foxes, rabbits have increased to the extent of there 

 not being any corn to cut, and it is recorded that in the same year 

 the Dartmoor foxhounds, hunting near Shipley, attacked a pony 

 and killed it before they could be driven off. 



Coverts enclosed by ground game proof wire-netting preclude 

 all idea of sport, therefore the incubus of protection for crops 

 rests, if sporting is to continue, with the cultivators, and this 

 protection in a sporting district must not be of such nature as to 

 unduly interfere with fox-hunting. Barbed top-wire fencing 

 enclosing farms and fields practically preclude fox-hunting, and 

 may be justifiable in the case of nurseries, fruit plantations, market 

 and private gardens. Where such fencing exists or may be 

 erected, and ground game is to be excluded, wire-netting is easily 

 affixed, the only important points to attend to being the width, 

 mesh and insertion in the ground. The netting, 3 ft. wide, 

 ij in. mesh, should be placed in the ground 6 in. at an angle 

 of 45 on the side from whence rabbits are to be prevented from 



