T he first pickup on Carswell’s round was a couple of ewes. Some farmers prefer to stack up a few dead before calling the knackerman, and some, already overstretched, might not even notice an animal is gone. Sometimes, animals expire in plain view, but often a beast that knows it’s going to die will do so in private – limp into the undergrowth, find a corner by the hawthorn, vanish into the scrub. Sometimes they don’t even discover a dead animal until several days later. Some farmers will phone in stock when they discover it, but others will wait until the Tuesday. The trouble with bank holidays, he said, is that there’s always a backlog. Some had been phoned in over the weekend and then emailed through to him the previous night, while others had come direct to his phone from individual farmers who know he does this run.Īs we drove, Carswell talked. This morning, he had 15 jobs listed before the office opened. He’s been driving this area for so long that he knows every road, lane, track and short-cut within a 100-mile radius. In the course of a working day, he might travel between 100 and 300 miles, but the day I was with him he never had to switch on the GPS. Half the skill of the job, Carswell said, is the daily mental route-mapping and the joining-up of one job (dead cow, tricky access) with another (live sow, no further information) into a seamless and economical day’s driving. And then, year-round, there are the plagues of economics: animals that may well be healthy but could only be raised at a loss. Summer can mean either drought or rain, and then it’s back into autumn – early frosts, gales and hail. Spring brings the diseases of growth: too much too quickly, or not enough for too long. Despite all of agriculture’s efforts to even out seasonal peaks and troughs, there are still more deaths in winter and spring, and even with stock indoors, cold and infection still kill off the weak or the soft. Like farming itself, knackering is governed by the seasons. The deaths go on all the time, quietly, unobserved, in the corners of fields and byres. And that’s without the hazards of cast sheep (pregnant ewes who have rolled over and can’t get up again), sheep with scrapie or scab or liver fluke. Young lambs may not be able to tolerate the lurch from warm day to evening chill, and these murky, fevered days breed fly-strikes: flies lay their eggs in the sheep’s fleece, producing maggots that then feed off wounds and can, if left unchecked, prove fatal. Animals don’t like these atmospheric leaps and plunges any more than humans do. The day I went with Carswell on his rounds was a Tuesday, after a bank holiday weekend of thunderstorms, sudden downpours and shifts in temperature so sharp that the roads smoked. He wears a blue work shirt with “MT Andersons” across the top-left pocket, a pair of black wellies and a digital watch (consulted frequently), and around his neck hangs the remote control for the winch that hauls carcasses into the back of the tipper.
He’s big, but the bulk is mainly muscle, and he’s both fit and agile, tall, round-faced, strong-shouldered. As he drove, Carswell concentrated on his schedule, sitting with the steering wheel held in front of him like a man before a Sunday roast. Every day, each one loops out from the centre in a ragged oval, stopping, picking up, moving on.
#MEDICINE BYWORD FOR CRACK DRIVERS#
In their case, the executioner comes to them.Īndersons has 12 drivers covering the West Midlands. These are the animals who will never leave home or face the long final journey to the abattoir. Their job is to deal with the animals that for one reason or another do not thrive: the sick or lame or old, the ones that never got close to being old, the cows condemned, the pigs with broken legs, the orphan lambs that took one look at life and quit, the ailing horses, the sickly ewes and surplus bullocks. Carswell and his colleagues dispatch sick or injured animals on farms, and collect those that have died “naturally” (by injury, disease, sometimes old age) before transporting them back to their depot, where they are categorised and sometimes moved on to renderers, who extract materials for recycling. But in the essentials, knackering is as it always was.
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