Simon Whitehead - My Rabbiting Life

I often wonder when I am working in my studio editing images or writing articles, whether we actually touch time or time touches us. It certainly regulates our lives — an abstract, visible simply by the movement of two or three arms on a dial or the sequence of constantly moving numbers. Hunter gatherers lived by a different measure, the moon and sun through the heavens and more importantly when they could harvest berries, follow the dawn to dusk patterns of their quarry or trail a herd migration route. Sunrise and sunset would have been the nearest measure of time, not an abstract but tangible, visible and constant.

There have been many yesterdays amongst friends, country people who understand nature, work with and within nature, the natural world; toiling or revelling in our seasons with all the elements the weather can throw at us. Rabbits up trees was a yesterday, one which appears like yesterday so clearly etched on my mind, but in the face of reality the hour, minute and second hands have been turning for an intervening 23 years. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Simon Whitehead for this article and my In Conversation with…… it was the starting point of a conversation. Perhaps not one of his finest contracts by his own admission, having just started out on a self-employed career-path controlling rabbits commercially by ferreting, demonstrating his craft at country shows and the first foray into publishing, the bark stripping rabbits gave the opportunity for an early foundation of financial worth in a  commercial business world.

Simon and I had met many times on the coursing grounds of Norfolk, when Swaffham Coursing Club were holding meets and especially the three-day Anglia Cup, which attracted entries from all over England and Ireland. At that time he was working as a pest controller and I remember when we first discussed him leaving that employment to follow ferreting, a childhood passion from the days when he lived in Middlesborough. For the record he is not a Geordie, any mention of it in his presence will invoke a verbal stream of historical, factual ethnicity concerning people from his home town, formally in North Yorkshire.Throughout this time ferrets and rabbiting had been the release from the enclosed employed work conditions; unfulfilling demands of an earlier education system and formal employment.

The crafted root of Simon Whitehead’s work stems from his childhood, of all the ‘tools’ of his trade, ferrets are the foundation along with the dogs, which are his companions, working in an above ground harmony with the underground searching ferret. Breeding ferrets is a vital aspect, ensuring a good, strong, clean gene pool amongst his hobs and jills. He also has an unerring respect for the natural world and the animals that inhabit it; only those close to him or have experienced his work first hand will know the reverence he has for the wild rabbit. His rabbit control work is a holistic harvest, actioned to effect the minimal of wildlife disturbance beyond a warren whilst providing a supply of meat for the table or butcher outlet. There are legions where the rabbit is neither respected or admired by those seeking to eradicate it from a locality.

Watching him work on arable land, estuary bank, meadow, moor, garden or commercial orchard, he has a capacity and capability to immediately assess the extent of a warren or several that may be close together, he thinks both like the ferret which will soon explore that ground beneath his feet and the rabbit which will seek to outwit the invader in its home. Experience has provided an innate understanding of the rabbit, its dark underground world and above ground feeding habit, where a bolt hole may be just a short dash to safety. The long nets he sets will have been carefully considered just beyond the boundary of the warren to limit a bolting rabbit.  Simon’s mantra, is not about catching rabbits but simply ‘not letting rabbits escape’.

In the main his work is solitary no concessions to the weather, in the timely fashion where everybody looks back to traditional rural crafts and professions, his is not a rose tinted dip into the warm glow of history. It is the cold reality of tooth and claw, bone chillingly long cold hours outdoors, exposed to the saturating rain, sleet and snow, delving down into damp cold earth, long, long hours of physical, mentally sapping isolation and solitude with only a dog and ferrets for company. Carving out financial security can be and has been equally sapping and the demons of doubt and insecurity are often never far away. Those elements and demons affect us all, as a photographer I can testify in equal measure.

Human nature has strange facets, academia was not, by Simon’s admission, a strong point and he is quite shy. But, academia counts for nothing because while the hands of time have been turning, he has written books and completed DVD’s on ferreting, produces short films, won a film award, acts as a clothing company ambassador, demonstrates at cooking stands and enlivens any country show ring audience with his ferreting displays. Throughout these he is eloquent, expansive in his knowledgable of the ferret and rabbit, passionate and above any academic criteria, intelligent.

Seasonal ferreting work and the country show circuits have enabled Simon to promote and carve out a career, he may now possibly be the last of his kind. The hour hand of time of a true countryman in zoo Britain, where the countryside is rapidly declining into an urban miasma.

Throughout and despite what life’s circumstances may have thrown up, he has very successfully made rabbiting his life.