Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 7 December 2017

I would like to call Tara’s weirdly seductive power the life force but it’s more like the death force

issue 09 December 2017

While the vet was checking Gracie, I asked him to take a look at Tara, the old chestnut hunter. Just a look, mind you, from a safe distance. I wouldn’t recommend anyone, however qualified, approach the red devil.

Aged 32, she is slower than she used to be but still finds ways to express her love of violence. Imagine the dragon from Lord of the Rings coming at you with its neck stretched out, baring teeth, and somehow bending itself round to aim its back end at you at the same time.

She has always been like that — coming at you with both ends, they call it — so no suggestions on a postcard, please, as to what made her this way. She’s had a wonderful life, and she has never stopped celebrating it by being unconscionably aggressive and hideous. If you anthropomorphise animals enough to give them lovely attributes, then you have to make the leap to allow them to have awful traits, too.

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