Farthing Wood Deaths Revisited (Horrific Injuries Bonus Round): Tails You Lose

As I stated back in May, I wasn't yet done with my retrospective upon the many gruesome and disturbing deaths from the first two series of The Animals of Farthing Wood.  Revisiting the series, it struck me that a couple of the most shocking instances of onscreen violence from Series 2 resulted merely in non-fatal injuries, and I thought it a shame that, owing to the nature of the retrospective, I wouldn't also be able to cover those.  So in the end I decided to stick them on as a special bonus round.  I will not be rating these, but I thought each of them worthy of their own miniature review.

The first of these occurs after the Farthing animals' bungled assassination attempt on Scarface, which  instead resulted in the death of Bounder and left Scarface eager to hit back against the culprit before they have another chance to strike.  Ranger has tipped Scarface off as to Adder's whereabouts, falsely believing that Adder had acted independently of the Farthing Fox and hoping to divert his father's attentions away from their ongoing feud.  Scarface isn't quite so naïve, but recognises that it is imperative that he get Adder out of the way while her venom levels are still replenishing.  Finding Adder basking in the sun by the pond, Scarface carefully sneaks up on her, but Adder spies him in time and makes a sharp bolt to a small hole in the bank of the pond.  Unfortunately, she isn't quite quick enough, with Scarface managing to grab the end of her tail and clamping down hard on it with his jaws.  Adder is able to latch on to a large root from inside the hole and the two of them engage in a vicious game tug of war for a while, before finally something has to give - this being the end of Adder's tail, which is literally torn in half onscreen.

I can still recall the initial shock I felt when I first saw this sequence back in 1994; the moment of severance happens in a blink of an eye, but it manages to be stark and unsettling, in no small part due to the small streaks of red which momentarily burst from Adder's broken body.  This is otherwise an entirely bloodless affair, but no less gruesome for it; we see from the subsequent shots that Scarface has bitten off quite a sizeable chunk of Adder's tail, which makes the sight of him standing beside the discarded remains (along with the images of Adder's mutilated body from inside the hole) utterly skin-crawling.