Musings on lurchers and the law of diminishing lurchers
by Gary Hosker.
THE law of diminishing returns – a principle in economics: at any given stage of technological advance an increase in productive factors applied beyond a certain point fails to bring about a proportional increase in production. Translated into lurcher speak – you can only catch a rabbit once and the more one catches, the harder they become to catch.
Now, a fact. I am to directions what Mike Tyson is to ballet dancing. North, south, east and west I can understand, but much beyond that, magnetic variation for example, I simply cannot comprehend. If I walked north or east from home I was quickly into rabbits. Should I trot south or west, the rabbits thinned but the hare population increased. This led me to the assumption that hares (possibly due to rabbits soiling the land) did not enjoy the company of rabbits in numbers.
You see in my formative years, life for luchermen was carefree. As a couple of lurcher lads, Bernard Morton and I wandered wherever we wanted, without a care in the world. Afterall, it was the sixties, an era of which they say: ‘if you remember it, you were not there’. That’s not exactly true, for I remember parts of it.
Bernard and I were 14 or 15. I cannot remember exactly, but somewhere around that impressionable age. We were rabbit fanatics. We ate, slept and dreamt about rabbits and whippets and debated endlessly the merits of the various whippet crosses.
