Long nails, long nets: sporting artist Jessica Mouland on her obsession with ferreting

The question Jessica Mouland gets asked more than any other has nothing to do with ferrets, rabbits or the brindle lurcher at her heel. It is about her nails. Super long pale pink talons. “How can I be a proper country girl with immaculate nails like this?” she laughs. They are solely for the camera, because an artist who photographs her own hands at work most days for social media needs them to look polished.

Jessica is 32 and lives in Dorset. Under the name Mulberry & Hare she draws coloured-pencil portraits of working dogs and a growing collection of wildlife and fieldsports originals. She says when people hear “fieldsports artist” they make assumptions. “People think, because I am a woman, I will be riding a horse or picking-up with a Labrador. They wouldn’t immediately go to smelly, nippy ferrets.”

From beagling and clay shooting to an obsession with ferreting

She has hunted all her life, growing up following the South Dorset around Purbeck, and was Master of a pack of beagles, on foot, for eight seasons. A couple of years ago friends introduced her to clay shooting at Purbeck Shooting School, and she recently shot her first deer, a sika stag. None of it, though, comes close to the sport she calls her own. “Without question, my main pastime is ferreting. I am obsessed with ferreting.”

Eight ferrets and a rehomed lurcher called Scooby

Her eight ferrets live in a 12ft dog kennel she converted for them. Her working partner is Scooby, a nine-year-old brindle lurcher she rehomed. “He’s the best decision I’ve ever made. He’s such a gentleman, and he loves his job. I only have to get that ferret box out and Scooby is there whining to go. I think that’s what I love – watching the animals enjoy it.”

The kennel holds albinos, sandies, pure blacks, silvers and a few micro ferrets, “about the size of my hand”, which are her show stock and never see a warren. The first thing strangers ask is whether they bite. “All I get is, ‘How do you pick that up? Doesn’t it bite you?’ No, because from six weeks old those ferrets have come everywhere with me. They’re climbing out of the hutch to see me. They’re my babies. You put the work in at the beginning and they become totally docile.” She knows how each one works, and says they know her voice. “I whistle and they come out of the hole. They’re the most underrated, intelligent animals.”

Pest control for a farmer whose fields were alive with rabbits

Much of her ferreting has been pest control. She did a lot of it for a farmer she used to lamb for, whose warrens had spread out into open fields. “He’s got some lovely land, but it was just a field full of holes. We were having to shoot sheep with broken legs because the ground was so inundated. You’d be up there of an evening lambing and it was just alive with rabbits.” Nothing is wasted. Some rabbits go to local pubs with game on the menu, into her own kitchen and to the dogs, and the ferrets have the leftovers. “If you know ferrets, they’ll eat everything down to the last scrap.” She has even made the hides into little blankets for the ferret hammocks.

At her busiest she was out twice a week, working through a list of people who had rung her about rabbit problems, before an unsettled year at home put the nets away for a while. She is settling into a new life now and, with the season upon us, hopes to make up for lost time. “Scooby’s nine. He still loves it and he can still do it, but it’s about getting the last few years out of him before he’s too old.”

The ferreting lurcher with a TikTok following

That lurcher has a following of his own. Jessica started a TikTok account for Scooby, @castlehillferrety, while she was breeding ferrets and people were asking after her bloodline. He now has around 23,500 followers there and another 12,000 on Facebook, and one video went viral and attracted 3 million views. “I went to the Melplash Show one year and someone came up and said, ‘That’s that dog off TikTok. He does ferrets.’ It was like having a celebrity. They asked if they could take a photo with him.” The views have even earned her a little money, but the pleasure, she says, is watching the videos back and seeing how much the lurcher enjoys himself. “His insatiable appetite and unbridled joy for working the land is infectious and keeps me coming back,” she says.

What viewers find hardest to believe is the relationship between the lurcher and the ferrets. “I’ve got a working dog that likes to kill things, but at the same time he’s the most gentle giant. He sits there and eats his food with his ferrets. He protects them. They are a team.” And no, he does not eat them. “There’s this idea that a working dog that likes to kill things is a nasty dog, and it’s not the case at all.”

The TikTok comments from followers also reveal how little most people know. “There’s just no knowledge on ferreting. People don’t understand what you’re doing it for. So many people ask, ‘Why do you need to do that? What’s that fluffy thing you’re putting down the hole?’ It’s so unknown to people who have never done it.”

Showing and breeding ferrets through the summer

If winter is for pest control, then summers are for showing and breeding. Jessica has bred several litters, swapping bloodlines with friends who ferret, and has the rosettes and trophies to show for it. “It gets a bit addictive once you start.” Scooby goes in the ring too.

Why ferreting needs more women

What she would like to change is the idea that a ferret box belongs in a man’s hands. “It’s such a lost fieldsport, other than Simon Whitehead and how he’s pushed it out there. People would never naturally think of a woman doing it. It’s always been a man’s pastime.” It raises eyebrows among her non-shooting friends but people ask all the time, “Can I come out? I’m so interested to see what they do.”

Her art and her ferreting, she says, are two sides of the same thing. “For me, Mulberry & Hare is about celebrating our working companions within fieldsports. Without them we couldn’t do it. I hunted a lot, and without hounds you can’t hunt. Everybody who shoots has gundogs, and I’ve got my lurcher.”

There may not be mud under those manicured nails, but there is a long net over her shoulder on a frosty morning, a lurcher at her heel and ferrets that come to her whistle. And if a few more women read her story and find themselves looking into ferreting, so much the better. Not all influencers want you to buy the next big thing. Some just want to see more people getting outside and picking up a purse net. That, in our book, is an influencer worth following.