News about Wilfred Owen

At Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, the mammoth task of counting more than 11,000 animals for an annual stocktake has started. As part of the herculean project, every mammal, bird, reptile, fish, and invertebrate will be weighed and measured. Well, not all of the creatures are keen participants, but I suppose they are not all. Because zookeepers must line up for their morning feed or coaxing camels with a delectable snack, they must use clever strategies to compel the animals to stand up and be measured, such as 'tricking' penguins to walking over scales.

The University of Warwick has issued a warning far from the Madding Crowd (inset), which depicts the brutal reality of Victorian rural life. Thomas Hardy's (19th Century work (right) explores Bathsheba Everdene's loves and marriages, as well as faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak (left), Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts appear as the characters in the book's 2015 film version). Gabriel's two hundred pregnant ewes are chased by his dog and crash to their deaths off a cliff in one scene. He kills his inexperienced sheepdog and becomes penniless after this. Four of Bathsheba's sheep died after eating a field of clover in a separate chapter. The Warwick's English Department set the alarm off the novel in the midst of scenes in which students could be 'upset by' as the story depicts the 'cruelty of nature and the rural life'.