Chasing Hares (NHB Modern Plays)

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Dogs with a high inherited drive not only derive great pleasure from chasing, they also need to perform it. They are driven to perform the behaviour to receive the boost to their feelings that it provides. They are constantly looking for outlets for it. Hare coursing is an illegal activity - where dogs are used to chase, catch and kill hares - and is a serious problem in some rural areas. Not only does hare coursing involve cruelty to wild animals, it is also associated with a range of other criminal activities, including theft, criminal damage, violence and intimidation. You must make sure that whatever you ask him to do he does it – be that waiting while you go through a gate, getting in and out of the car or coming when called – they may seem like small things but you have to be 100% in control at all times and he must respond to you immediately.

I wanted to write about 'jatra' or Bengali folk theatre, as an art form that has developed from dramatisations of religious stories from the Mahabharata to plays that reflect the lives of real people and events. Now, jatra is struggling to compete with Hindi cinema and cable TV, so I see the persistent love for jatra from the characters in Chasing Hares as a leap of faith. A leap of faith similar to that needed to believe things can change, and to act on that belief.

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Certainly a work in progress, all I need to do now is find a more suitable type of toy “for wood walks”, one that is not so easily lost in the undergrowth and I will work with her some more on this. Chasing Hares pulls together so many precious threads from my personal and family experience of work precarity and political and cultural resistance in West Bengal. A dog with chase drive towards the top end of the scale is not easy to control because it is very difficult to counter internally reinforcing behaviour with external reinforcement. A dog will not stop chasing for the promise of a biscuit simply because a biscuit is not as valuable as the internal dopamine boost from the chase behaviour. In fact, nothing is more valuable than the thrill of the chase. Neither can you punish them into stopping for good.

There are persistent groups who illegally perpetuate hare coursing creating challenges for the police. It’s tough to try to change behaviours that have been wired-in for such a long time, but some improvement is nearly always possible. You probably need to persevere for at least the time she spent practising her previous behaviours. In original canine terms, the wild animal inherits exactly the right amount of each part of the sequence to lead it into the next. Because domestic dogs have been selected to exhibit exaggerated parts of the sequence and omit others, the whole predatory hunting sequence is rarely in balance in modern breeds. Variation appears both between and within breeds. Spaniels benefit from a huge internal reward from searching, but little or none from stalking. Pointers get huge internal reward from stalking, but not from a killing-bite, because of hundreds of generations of selective breeding. Individuals within each breed will inherit more or less of each part than others. This is the variability that makes some spaniels better at searching than others, or some pointers hard-mouthed. I was beginning to come to the conclusion that I would have to rehome her with a cat free home, which would break my heart.Tragedy, in fact, isn’t far off, as might be expected from a work that won the 2021 playwriting award from Theatre Uncut, an entity formed in 2011 to galvanise politically-engaged writing across the spectrum. It will often be exhibited towards more than one target (cars, ankles, rabbits, cats, sheep, joggers, bicycles?).