Latest news with #ChloeDalton
Times
2 days ago
- General
- Times
Respite for hares as officials back a close season for hunting
Brown hares could finally have a respite from year-round shooting after the government said it supported ambitions to introduce a close season. Unlike other game such as deer and pheasants, brown hares — the numbers of which have declined by more than 80 per cent over the past century — can be hunted all year. Last week, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said England and Wales 'stand out as being among the few European countries not to have a close season,' adding that it had failed 'to give it the protection we should'. It said it would look for 'a suitable primary legislative vehicle to deliver this close season'. Chloe Dalton, the former Foreign Office adviser who wrote the acclaimed non-fiction book Raising Hare, which is based on her experiences living with the animals in her rural home, said the absence of a close season meant hunters turned their attention to brown hares when all other game species were protected. 'The hare you can shoot at any time and commonly, because of the prohibition on shooting these other animals, such as pheasant, which you can't shoot from February 1, it is a good time for business reasons to shoot hares in February. 'So the peak shooting season for hares coincides with their breeding season, during which period most female hares are either lactating or pregnant or both. If you shoot a mother hare, her young [leverets] starve to death. It is an animal welfare issue,' she told the Hay Festival. 'It is a core principle of conservation that you don't kill an animal when it is breeding,' Dalton added. • Chloe Dalton: My father read Joseph Conrad to us at the kitchen table Brown hares are one of Britain's most extraordinary — and previously revered — species. In his account of the Gallic Wars 2,000 years ago, Julius Caesar said native Britons refused to eat the animal because it was sacred. Dalton's book outlines how brown hares are able to carry two litters of leverets simultaneously, in a process known as superfetation. They can move at 37 of their own body lengths per second, while a cheetah, the fastest land animal, can move at 23 of its body lengths per second. Dalton said: 'I think it is straightforward. We should grant to hares the same protection that we give to every other game species. Scotland already has, and most of Europe. So what happens is that they [European hunters] come over to [England and Wales] to do it.' A petition calling upon the government to protect hares and leverets from shooting during the breeding season from February 1 to September 30 has now been signed by over 20,000 people. According to the Hare Preservation Trust, there were about four million brown hares in Britain in the late 1800s. It said numbers had declined by more than 80 per cent during the past century — which it said was at least in part also due to the intensification of agriculture — and has also stated that in parts of Britain, such as the southwest, 'the brown hare is almost a rarity and may even be locally extinct'. Dalton, who was being interviewed at the Hay Festival by Lord Hague of Richmond, her former boss, who also supports the introduction of a close season, said the case should be made that the hare was 'an iconic national animal'. 'There is something about the quietly persistent, unassuming hare that speaks to who we are in this country,' Dalton said. 'I hope we can reverse these years of inattention.'
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
The Government needs a new plan for stopping small boat crossings
SIR – Chloe Dalton's book, Raising Hare (Features, May 28), is undoubtedly a remarkable account of her relationship with an orphaned leveret, but her petition seeking a closed season for hares is unfortunately a distraction from better steps that can be taken to ensure the hare population flourishes. The 80 per cent decline in UK hare numbers in the past century was most marked following the world wars, as game shooting and the number of gamekeepers dwindled; fortunately, while population density varies widely across the UK, it has been largely stable since the 1990s, and the hare remains a common animal. In some areas, mostly in the east, it is very numerous indeed, and needs regulation. Elsewhere, smaller populations are largely cherished. Work by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust has identified the cornerstones to a thriving hare population – chiefly predator control and the provision of year-round food supply and shelter. Ensuring that government schemes continue to support the latter should be a far more pressing concern than a campaign for a close season, which may have the unintended consequence of encouraging pre-emptive culls where hare numbers might cause problems, removing the ability to address crop damage only as it arises. Matthew Higgs Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire SIR – Chloe Dalton's account of raising a new-born leveret is heart-warming, but she is not alone in having done this. Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne (1789), records an extraordinary example of inter-species nurturing. A friend had 'a little helpless leveret' brought to him, which his servants began raising with spoonfuls of cow's milk. But it soon disappeared, and was assumed to have been 'killed by some cat or dog'. Not at all. At about the time of the leveret's disappearance, the same friend had 'dispatched' the latest litter of his pet cat, no doubt by drowning, and about a fortnight later, while sitting in his garden one evening, 'he observed the cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their kittens, and something gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support with great affection. Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and predaceous one!' Hugh Keyte London SE1 SIR – I heard Chloe Dalton's book read on BBC Radio 4, and enjoyed it with friends in my book group. I now have items in my home and garden displaying hares, and would support any charity protecting them. Thank you, Chloe, for Raising Hare. Cathy Gooding
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Chloe Dalton: People said I was a workaholic. Raising a hare changed my life
'She belonged to the wild, and my job, to the extent that I had one in those early weeks, was to try to keep her alive so that she could return to the wild,' says Chloe Dalton, the author of Raising Hare. The 'she', of course, is the long-eared title character of this remarkable real-life tale, which has been short-listed for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. Dalton, who's sitting smiling opposite me, sipping herbal tea, is the former government Spad whose lockdown debut has become a surprise bestseller, racing past 50,000 copies in hardback in just a couple of months. She's relaxed and happy, albeit already a little hoarse from talking about the book, just as she embarks on a month-long tour to promote it. Raising Hare is a marvel. It takes only a couple of pages before one becomes completely rapt in this story of a chance encounter with a newborn hare as Dalton watches it grow up alongside her over the course of almost three years. Closely observed images of the creature take up long-term residence in the mind's eye – 'The sticky, squishy sound of a hare eating a raspberry', for instance. At the start, Dalton knows no more than the rest of us about hares ('one of the things I discovered about myself is that I love being a novice, a beginner') but as she explores their history, we witness their struggle to survive in a country where the brown hare population has declined by 80 per cent in a century, harried by industrial farming, shooting and illegal hare coursing. Dalton, who is 45, saw with admiration 'what it takes to exist in a world that's largely concreted over, if you're a wild animal that needs an enormous range, that has no burrow to hide in, that only has its speed, that lives in ever smaller, shrinking pockets of land and has to raise its young above ground, when every single predator that we have eats hares.' She's aware that without the several lockdowns and her split-second decision to pick up the baby hare, the events of the story would never have happened. She's struck by how many things in life are like that, 'that sometimes the most significant events in our life mean so much because they come so close to not happening. We're not looking for them. I certainly wasn't looking to change anything about my life.' Dalton had been blown home by the Covid pandemic from her job as a London-based foreign policy adviser to spend the lockdown in a converted barn close to her parents in the North East. On a winter walk, she spotted a tiny leveret, 'no longer than the width of my palm', alone on a track. (She later worked out that, weighing under 100g , or 'less than an apple', the animal can only have been a day or two old.) At first, conscious that human interference might do more harm than good, she left the leveret where it was. But on finding it still there four hours later, with buzzards wheeling overhead, and the possibility of cars on the track, she hesitated, then acted on instinct and brought it home to keep it safe until nightfall. A call to a former gamekeeper soon convinced her that its mother would not take it back after her intervention, and so Dalton began to try to work out how to care for the leveret. Thus began the story of Dalton's co-existence with the hare, one in which she would first have to learn how to feed it, initially on powdered kitten milk formula, later – with a little help from verses by the 18th-century poet William Cowper, who kept hares – on porridge oats. That first night, she fed it from a washed and sterilised cosmetics bottle with a pipette, a few drops at a time, and created an improvised hide for it in her office from a shoebox filled with grass. Overnight, it made a nest among the stalks. She moved it to a spare bedroom; she also learned that hares 'don't do well in human hands', reading how leverets in captivity often die from stress caused by noise and excessive handling. But the hare began to feed properly and after a week had started to run around after feeding. Placed in its box, it would stay still for hours, mirroring baby leverets' behaviour in the wild. A website recommended moving it to an enclosed run to prepare it for return to the wild after weaning at eight weeks, but the leveret showed physical signs of distress and Dalton soon abandoned the idea. It chose instead to spend time in her office and living room, then took to sleeping under her bed during the day. Every day at four it would rise and wander out into the garden and she would bring it in to feed at dusk. She realised that, contrary to most accounts, it was not solitary by nature and would spend its time close to her as she worked, and find its way under her bed at night, too. 'I think we all have in us this desire, whether we're male or female, to nurture, and that takes many forms, and to protect something that's young and helpless,' she says. 'The rather beautiful twist in the story, from my point of view, was the realisation that as a human I felt at the beginning that I was quite central to this animal's existence. But I realised quite rapidly that actually, I really wasn't, I was in her space. She tolerated me. She felt safe around me.' Dalton discovered that the animal's 'calmness and tranquil demeanour' soothed her. For the previous 15 years, her life had been frenetically busy. For the first decade of it, she had worked in politics, including as an adviser to William Hague when he was Foreign Secretary between 2010 and 2014. 'I was a Spad,' she acknowledges. 'But before I was a Spad, I was a humble researcher in Parliament. 'When I was in the Foreign Office, phone calls would happen at all hours and I did the drafting [of speeches] for the Foreign Secretary. So if something happened in the middle of the night that affected Britain, and Parliament needed to be updated on a Sunday, I would go to work and I would write it. 'I would always hear people's warnings about burnout,' she adds. 'There's a funny photo of me somewhere where I'm literally juggling multiple telephones. People might have looked at me and said that I was a workaholic. I just was really passionate – I still am – about my work.' Dalton stayed working with Hague – who will interview her at the Hay Festival this week – after David Cameron's 2014 reshuffle ('loyalty is a very important part of my make-up'), but when he stood down at the 2015 election, she chose to continue as an independent foreign policy expert, working on campaigns with among others, Angelina Jolie, with whom she formed a partnership in 2015 to fight for women's rights and international justice. The author thanks Jolie in the book for 'giving me the courage – and inspiration – to experiment with my writing'. Dalton lived with a suitcase always packed and ready to go, she says. 'I was notorious for not wanting to commit to attending a family wedding because I might have to be in Iraq… I had no idea how much it would enrich my life to stop.' It has made her a warmer person, she tells me. She's the third of four siblings – two brothers and an elder sister. Her father's career as a British diplomat meant that Dalton grew up largely in the Middle East, as the family moved around with his overseas postings to places such as Oman and Jerusalem; her mother gave up her own career to 'devote herself to us,' Dalton says – her parents remain indispensable 'intellectual and emotional allies' to one another, she adds. Dalton still treasures 'those early experiences of seeing desert or very rugged mountains or the sea – places that are vastly different from the landscape here'. She went to 'lots of different schools' in the UK and overseas, before studying at Oxford University, and embarking on her career in politics. Hares need protection, Dalton insists, and 'I know a thing or two about putting a little bit of pressure on government.' She's lodged a petition to protect hares and their young from shooting during the breeding season – at present, they're the only game species that can be shot all year round. It had almost 17,000 signatures when I checked (100,000 is enough for it to be considered for debate in parliament). She's now working on an open letter as a next step. I note that wildlife presenter Chris Packham recently called on people to sign the petition on social media. She's delighted. Does she think the hostility that Packham sometimes attracts is personal or reflecting of a broader antagonism towards environmentalism in this country? 'I don't feel qualified to answer that,' she responds. (She also knows a thing or two of the politician's art of avoiding hot potatoes.) Her sister has a small farm nearby, though, and she has no hesitation in saying, 'I'm certainly worried and with the farming community in terms of the outcry that there's been about the impact of changes to inheritance tax and how it's going to affect small farmers... I share the concern about how careful we have to be about things that change the long term nature of the landscape. Once a family farm is gone, it's gone.' When the hare did make its first foray from her garden into the wild at six months old, and almost fully grown, leaping up one day onto the dry stone wall before bounding into the fields beyond, Dalton cried. 'It took me a while to admit that,' she says. (The hare, of course, would return, though Dalton didn't know it.) The book has an emotional restraint that only adds to its spell, yet there are moments when it communicates emotion very directly. In one episode involving the death of one of the hare's own leverets, the actress Louise Brealey who narrates the audiobook of Raising Hare, clearly struggles to hold her voice steady as she reads. 'I was writing things as they happened,' Dalton says, 'including the death of the leveret. I wrote it that afternoon, that passage, and I was full of emotion about it. No one ever said to me in my life in politics, I should be unemotional. But when you're trying to make your way in a world of politics, as in many walks of life, as a young woman, you want to make sure you're putting a professional face on and keep your emotions in check. Particularly dealing with issues as I was, related to war and peace and national security, I developed a little bit of a habit of shielding my emotions, and it was rather wonderful during the process of writing this book to be able to recognise that there's something about the relationship between humans and animals which is very special for humans, it brings out certain emotions.' She is at pains throughout the book to stress how determinedly she was not trying to domesticate the hare or anthropomorphise it. 'There's been this cultural shift that we treat pets as children, or as members of the family,' she notes. 'I never thought of the hare that way.' It has changed the way she approaches life. She continues to work as a speechwriter and consultant on international issues, particularly focusing on women affected by conflict, while splitting her time between London and her home in the barn. 'I wanted to be more dependable, for less of my life to be tied to things that were completely beyond my control, in terms of world events and I've rediscovered our country, which is beautiful, and have thought differently about the sort of dignity and value and meaning of lives spent in one place, rooted to a particular community or a particular home.' And what of the hare, which continued to treat the barn as its home, even giving birth there, I ask tentatively. 'I think she's gone,' Dalton says, quietly. 'It wouldn't surprise me if one day she didn't just reappear the way she always did, but I think she's run her last race, because she's been gone a while. You know, there's still a possibility that she's raising leverets, or that she's been sort of temporarily displaced by her offspring, because my garden is full of hares, including the latest set of leverets that have been born, which are either the third or fourth generation. But I'm pretty sure that if she were alive, she would be at my door, and she's not.' The hare vanished just before New Year and has not returned since. She accepts that this moment was always going to be part of her experience of 'feeling a strong bond to an animal that you knew could end at any point, could be taken by a predator at any point. But I feel rather fortunate that I haven't had to see her dead in the grass or something, which would be very, very painful and poignant.' The success of the book has brought consolation. 'I've had this incredible experience of going to bookshops up and down the country and people telling me all their stories of experiences with animals. A woman on the train told me about raising a piglet that had fallen off the back of a lorry, people tell you about hares from their childhood, or how they tried to raise a leveret or how they feel about the squirrels in the landscape.' And she has begun work on a second book, Pet, which leaps off from what she learnt about human-animal relationships from the hare, and 'how meaningful those kinds of ties are to people at all stages of their life. As a child, I loved animals, of course. But to see the sheer range and variety of those kinds of relationships... I have this feeling writing Pet that the hare is gone, but has left me these tracks and traces, and I want to follow them.'
Daily Record
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
Boswell Book Festival draws in the crowds with another successful year
Dumfries House hosted the Boswell Book Festival, the world's only festival dedicated to biography and memoir, at the weekend. Crowds flocked to the Boswell Book Festival as the world's only festival dedicated to biography and memoir was held at the weekend. Audiences were treated to a star-studded line up with the likes of Chloe Dalton, Helen Lederer, John Suchet and Wayne Sleep taking to the stage at Dumfries House near Cumnock. Sold-out events featured Rupert Everett in conversation with Fiona Armstrong about his book, The American No, and Pam Ayres - one of the UK's best-selling poets - with her book Doggedly Onward. A rare opportunity for tours of Auchinleck House, the family home of James Boswell, were also snapped up. Dom Joly took audiences on a tour of conspiracy theories around the globe including the funny and the quirky but also attempting to understand what makes people so drawn them. Ayrshire was at the heart of the festival - named after Auchinleck's James Boswell, the father of modern biography. Kilwinning author Andrew O'Hagan brought the house down in a riotous keynote that celebrated the dialect and humour of Scotland. Download the Ayrshire Live app today The Ayrshire Live app is available to download now. Get all the local news in your area – plus features, football news and the latest on the coronavirus crisis – at your fingertips 24/7. The free download features the latest breaking news and exclusive stories while you can customise your page with the sections that matter to you. The Ayrshire Live app is available to download now on iOS and Android. Rob Close and Gillian Hope gave an insight into the lives of soldiers from Ayrshire and Sanquhar on the front lines during World War 1 on the weekend that the 80th anniversary of VE Day was commemorated. The history of witchcraft and the persecution of 'witches' in Scotland was highlighted by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi alongside their book, How to Kill a Witch: A Guide for the Patriarchy. Events for all ages were a plenty on the Saturday and Sunday with Alison Galbraith, Alan Dapré and Vivian French entertaining as part of the Boswell Children's Festival.
Washington Post
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Meet the furry star of a new bestseller. Just don't call it a bunny.
That a hare is not a rabbit — and certainly not a bunny — is one of the many things you will learn in Chloe Dalton's endearing and enlightening new memoir, 'Raising Hare.' The book, a chronicle of Dalton's experience rescuing and nurturing a newborn hare she found along a road, has become a surprise bestseller and a contender for the 2025 Women's Prize for nonfiction.
