Chris Rundle learns more about catching rabbits the old-fashioned way – with a net, a ferret and a little patience

O f all the country pursuits, ferreting must be the most tranquil. No thundering of hooves, no volleys of shot, no animals crashing through thickets or birds cartwheeling, dead or dying, through the sky before thudding into the ground.

Just a couple of men, a couple of animals, a lot of expertise – and quite a bit of patience. A step back, in other words, to a more relaxed way of life and a different era, one where it was the squire and his friends who could afford the guns and the cartridges, while the farmworkers found food for their pot by the simple and remarkably cheap method of using a ferret to flush rabbits from their burrows and into nets strategically placed at the exit points.

It was – and still must be – one of the most cost-effective methods of hunting. Even today you can equip yourself with a ferret for less than a fiver, although it's rare to find anyone who still makes their own nets, like Ken Stephens does.

In fact, he's been doing so for 60 years, ever since he was shown the method by a farmworker in the West Somerset village of Monksilver, where he then lived.

"The only problem was that I was left-handed, so it all came out back to front," he says. "But I soon got the hang of it."

Ken's still making his left-handed nets. He'll knot one in about two hours but take a little longer for a large ditch net, used to cut off the escape route of any rabbits which find an unguarded tunnel from their burrow.

And, clearly, they still work: now that rabbits are swarming over the countryside once again, 75-year-old Ken, from Williton, near Minehead, and his 80-year-old mate Cliff Milton, will sometimes return home with more than 20 rabbits from a morning's expedition.

Each and every one is a cook's delight, because ferreted rabbits arrive in the kitchen in first-class condition. One swift chop to the back of the neck – the original rabbit punch – is all that is needed to dispatch a netted animal. There are no bite marks or pieces of shot to mar the meat.

"I've never used a gun or a dog in all the years I've been going out," says Ken. "And my ferrets won't bite the rabbits, either.

"They'll still hunt them because that's in their nature, but I make sure I feed them (he uses a combination of special dry ferret rations and tinned dog meat) two hours before I go out so they won't be hungry enough to try to kill them."

With farmers needing to devote as much time as possible to their core operations, the services of ferreters like Ken and Cliff are in great demand at the moment: anecdotal evidence suggests there are probably more rabbits around now than there have been since the early 1960s, when myxomatosis was introduced to reduce their numbers.

Such was the deadly efficiency of the disease (though the spectacle of rabbits suffering from its advanced stage was a sickening one) that by the time Ken returned from a year fighting in the Korean war, his mother had burned all his nets, figuring that he would never need them again.

It wasn't until a couple of decades later that a friend of his daughter presented him with a ferret and he decided to return to breeding and hunting with them.

Myxomatosis still stalks the countryside, though to nothing like the extent it did half a century ago, and the disease itself is not enough to keep the rabbit population in check – which is where people like Ken come in.

But while the technique of ferreting hasn't changed in centuries, there is one modern invention which proves invaluable on most expeditions: a ferret finder.

This £200-worth of miniature technology is a hand-held device that beeps in response to signals sent back from a transponder worn on a collar around the ferret's neck: with a range of 12ft, it's powerful enough to track the animal's underground movements and allows its owner to recover it, should it resurface, as often happens, many yards from where it was originally put into the burrow.

On the other hand, it pays to have the right kind of ferret.

"I have five at the moment," says Ken. "Three of them are excellent workers but the other two are really hopeless. You can put them in the hole and they'll jut sit there. I don't bother to take them out now.

"But of course, they all make good pets. I take mine around to all sorts of shows and the children love handling them.

"Everyone thinks ferrets bite, but they don't – unless they've been badly handled.

"I was given one once and I couldn't go near it without it going for me. It took me a long time to get to the point where I could pick it up. But that was only because it hadn't been treated properly before.

"It's a bit sad they have a reputation for being vicious. A lot of adults are quite suspicious of them whenever I take them to a show.

"Eventually, some of them will be prepared to pick them up and then they are surprised how gentle they are.

"But it's usually the women who get there first – and the men are the ones who will still hold back."