This summer we’ve attended numerous summer fetes and seen many traditional English games, events and stalls.  This weekend, at the Isfield Summer Fete in Sussex, we experienced for the first time terrier racing.[ad#ad-1]

It was an idyllic English summer afternoon, bright and warm, with passing puffs of light cloud against an azure sky summoning an occasional light breeze.  The turn out was good and many of the summer fete standards were popular: the three-legged race, a dog show, egg throwing, bouncy slides, face painting and more.

Mid-afternoon, a crowd began to assemble around a fenced 30m track and the announcer informed us that the terrier racing was about to begin.

At one end of the track was a set of six “traps”, each about 18″ x 12″ with a gate on the front.  Members of the public registered their dogs and the dogs were separated to run in several heats.  Running along the centre of the track was a thin rope circuit with a foxtail attached to it. The rope was controlled with great skill by a fellow at the other end of the track using an upturned bicycle.  The rope was fed round the rear wheel and the operator span the pedals back and forth, correspondingly jiggling the foxtail back and forth before the expectant terriers.  This he did several times until the loader had all the dogs in their traps and was ready to raise the cage gates on the front of the traps.

The foxtail was brought to rest a few feet from the traps and dogs and spectators alike excitedly awaited the loader’s signal.  At the drop of his hand the loader opened the traps and his counterpart at the opposite end of the track span the bike wheels like crazy to pull the foxtail along the track keeping it ahead of the chasing terriers.  Along the track they all sped chasing the tail that reached the other end and mysteriously vanished in to thin air before a stack of hay bales. Some attempted to follow the tail in to the bales, others leapt over the top while a few simply turned round and ran back to the start to do it again.