I publicly declare that wicked men are in general its most determined foes

I publicly declare that wicked men are in general its most determined foes. The words by themselves are not allowed to set their own tone – and yet a face of perfectly versatile neutrality is almost impossible to achieve.Perhaps this protests too much. Writing 200 years ago, Johann Caspar Lavater, the father of modern physiognomy, made a telling point against his opponents:”The majority of them – it is a mournful but a true remark – the majority are enemies of, because they dread the light of, physiognomy. Why should someone’s apparent beauty, ugliness, age or youth stand as a point of cross-reference for their every word? Why should some frozen look of derangement, petulance, smugness, kindness, wisdom or affability constantly orient one’s reading, as if each sentence bore the stage direction “smugly”, “affably” etc?It only results in a needless confusion of signals The stern face makes a joke The cheery face says something cruel All kinds of complex and unnecessary over-readings follow. Exploiting that feeling is the basic gambit behind the use of writers’ photos.It is not only irrational It is an outrage to the business of reading and writing. You don’t need to have any high ideas about authorial impersonality or writing-as-mask to see that it could be an advantage, for writer and reader, if the printed word weren’t continually inflected by whatever a face may communicate. You know, for example, that photography is very fallible, and can make someone look like anything.

You know that faces are open signs, and that the same picture of someone’s face, when you know them, looks quite different from how it looked when you didn’t know them. A single picture of someone you don’t know tells you almost nothing more. But the feeling persists: a face gives you a purchase on someone, opens them up to you. If you put a face to a name, you supply some sort of extra and valuable knowledge about that person.Of course, it is easy to believe this You believe it, in spite everything that you know. And there are other examples of this tendency, rather closer to home.
The ancient study of physiognomy, of reading character from the face dies hard. Few people now will own up to the doctrine in its more rigorous, scientific form – observing firm rules for interpreting the length of a brow or the turn of a lip The whole subject has been thoroughly discredited. But some adherence to the notion lingers on – and it seems to linger most stubbornly, even with increasing conviction, in the editorial departments of newspapers.The outrageous, irrational and burgeoning practice of appending, to a piece of print, a picture of the writer’s face, betrays an ineradicable faith in physiognomy True, it is physiognomy of a very lay, commonsensical sort But the general idea remains.

Someone who voted at an election on the basis of a candidate’s race wouldn’t be voting sensibly. Yet a candidate who omitted their face from an election leaflet could well be suspected of withholding important information. It is the sort of public anonymity usually extended only to victims or to criminals Everyone else is encouraged to show a face. If they won’t, the general presumption is that they must have something to hide

It is a doubtful presumption, but a strong one.

But I forced myself to do the deed, and now he is in the deep-freeze, ready to come out fresh and treacherous as ever in the spring of 1997.Larsen traps are available from the Game Conservancy, Fordingbridge, Hants.. The group of SAS men who attended their recent press conference with their heads bagged up in balaclavas, and answering only to codenames, created a rare form of public appearance. On the final morning the open side of the trap had been sprung, and the front half of a rabbit, which I had put in there as an extra lure, had disappeared.This showed that the fox had been down into the trap and set it off, but somehow escaped. I have heard of a cat being caught in a Larsen trap, but a fox would surely have set a record. In any event, Judas appeared unmoved: he must have had nerves of steel to have survived that upheaval right beside him.By then I had grown rather fond of him, and did not look forward to putting him out of his misery. Instead, I relied on a chemical barrier of Reynardine, the foul- smelling fox repellent.This seemed to work for one night, but lost its potency the next. Three times, in the morning, I found evidence of a ferocious struggle – moss scrabbled back all round the trap, the perch dragged out sideways, the baler twine securing it bitten through.

But then there was a sinister new development: he began to come under fox-attack at night.At that stage I had the trap on an old concrete footing, so that I could not peg in the small electric fence with which I had been protecting it earlier. The question was, what to do with him? At one stage my wife advocated setting him free, as a reward for good service. But, when we thought about it, this seemed ridiculous: as the aim of the whole exercise was to reduce the magpie population, it would be pointless to increase it by one.For a few days I dithered. I continued to feed and water the bird in the hope that he still might bring off more captures. Besides, the ripples of his good work have spread far afield: one of his victims had gone alive to a new trap down the valley, and another to an SAS training area in Wales.At home, however, his usefulness seemed to have ended. But what became perfectly clear was that the call-bird could not communicate any form of warning: for all the chatter that went on, the wild bird never took off in fright.With the score at 15 magpies and one carrion crow, Judas had effectively emptied our end of the valley. They would land on top of the trap, hop off on to the ground, hop back on, fly up into the hedge, chatter furiously, make close passes over the cage, land again, strut about, and then fly off some distance, only to return in a few minutes.In the end, inevitably, one would descend into the open side of the trap, spring the dummy perch and be caught.