His sales pitch was a face that promised actual bodily harm to anyone who dared send him away without having bought a chunk of meat. He drank away his gains in dipsodality at a rudimentary pub which sold dense opaque scrumpy. This stuff was fortified by lumps of rotting meat and the bodies of vermin .... Just as alcohol and atropine alter behaviour and sight so will an electric saw and axe alter a just-dead beast, turn it into a saleable commodity that is unrecognisable as the sheep that was in your field an hour ago. Here is the beauty of this sort of crime, in the swiftness of the transformation: sheep shot in a field in Stow-on-the-Wold are halal mutton in Birmingham an hour later. It takes half an hour to change a forest buck into London venison. This is rustling. This is business.