Welcome to my-reynard.com
So you may be asking yourself why an image of a fox when I talk a lot about the survival of wildlife and even the survival of the human race because we intrinsically entwine. Ok, there are two main reasons why I chose a fox as my media; the first reason is that when I was growing up in a small village in Northamptonshire, United Kingdom, I would spend many hours out in the countryside and one day when I was about eleven years of age I was about two miles away from my village carrying my shotgun with my lovely Labrador walking beside me. My Labrador was aptly named Trigger because he was passed to us by a gamekeeper who called him Trigger before he came to us. So on the day that Trigger and I were walking beside a very high hedge row that led up to some wooded area, Trigger suddenly began growling at the base of an old oak tree. He was snarling, and the hair on his back was upright; I immediately investigated the bottom of the old oak tree, and to my surprise, I saw a tiny fox cub crouching down under a slight hollow under the roots of the tree. The cub was no more than about ten days old but already fiercely trying to defend himself from Trigger and me, I stepped away and told Trigger to sit and guard, and he promptly obeyed. I searched the entire area for signs of his family but could find nothing, so I decided that I would have to take him home with me, not wanting to leave him to starve and die. To cut a long story short, I took him home and kept him in a shed in the garden. I fed him daily, initially with dog food and then gradually moved him onto dead rabbits and chicken and ducks until he could find food for himself, so I released him into the wild again; I had named him Reynard. So the second reason for the media is that in 2013, I lost my eyesight overnight due to my eyes filling with blood and destroying both retinae. This at the time, as you may imagine, was devastating to me but fortunately, because I am an ex-military person and I was instantly helped by The Blind Veterans Association, who took me to one of their centres for two weeks and taught me how to live as a blind person. The BVA now support me in everything I do, and this includes being able to write websites which I initially thought would be impossible for me to do. This is where the name REYNARD played a part in my life all over again because, you see, to learn the art of touch typing, you type out the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” I typed that sentence repeatedly until it was fixed into my head where to find every letter of the alphabet easily without eyesight. As I began to progress, I began to add more different words. Then I changed the word “fox” to Reynard and began to turn it into a story about a fictitious fox called Reynard and his arduous journey of survival in our British countryside. I have now completed an entire book of some 40000 words, primarily about Reynard but also some more severe information about our countryside and what the human race is doing to it with greed and pollution. For instance, our British countryside suffered a significant setback that began on 1ar January 1973, when we elected to join the European common market. We were asked to remove hedges and ditches and fill in ponds to turn small 10-acre fields into 100-acre fields with a promise that we could sell all of our grain crops into Europe on mass. The plain fact is that the sale evolution never happened. Still, our land was devasted by the removal of habitat for our wildlife and also, because we had removed so many of the hedges and boundaries means that natural defences for water runoff and soak-away were no longer prevalent, meaning that much of the soil from our lands ends up in rivers thus clogging them up and flooding many areas. You might argue that our councils should dredge the rivers to keep them clear, but another law stipulated by Europe says that any sediment dredged from rivers must be removed to a safe location away from the river. Before all of those regulations stipulated by Europe, our councils dredged rivers placing the silt onto the river banks allowing it to overgrow and create more habitat for our wildlife, but the change in the law means that councils can no longer afford to dredge rivers. The above is just one tiny element of the devastation caused by being part of the common market or European Union, as younger readers will know it, and the sheer destruction of our land and its wildlife will take many generations to rectify, if at all. The devastation is wide-reaching for foxes, badgers, stoats, weasels, rabbits, snakes, newts, butterflies, bees, many thousands of other animals and insect species and many species of birds. Our whole way of life has been destroyed in many different ways by rules and regulations forced through by Europe, and I have never yet seen a law presented by Europe that is beneficial to the British people.
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