Cute baby mice being bloodily impaled on thorns by a Shrike, on a daytime children's show. Yes, really.
Even though The Animals of Farthing Wood stars cute little animals trying to find a safe place to live, it certainly lives up to its reputation as having some of the most gruesome deaths on any children’s show.
- Several of the main animal characters were killed off horrifically during the journey: shot by hunters, hunted and cooked as a meal, run over by a truck, just to name a few. Highly traumatic since it seemed to be a general TV series about cute talking animal characters from the start, but actually the makers strived for realistic death scenes.
- The fact that many of the animals in the show are constantly in danger of being killed by various forces that would threaten them when they try to go to White Deer Park. Some examples include:
- Mrs. Pheasant being shot dead by the farmer, and her plucked-and-roasted corpse being seen later by her husband, Mr. Pheasant. This also doubles as a huge Tear Jerker; given that Mrs. Pheasant only died because she took up the guard duty that Mr. Pheasant neglected that night, and the instant he realizes who it is, he knows. He breaks down in horrified, remorseful tears at causing his own wife's death, and Mr. Pheasant's cries end up attracting the farmer; who finds and promptly shoots him as well.
- The Pheasants' deaths are the real Wham Episode of the series. Besides the ambiguity of the newts' fates, there had only been near-misses or comedic peril in the earlier episodes. Then Mrs. Pheasant is shot. A close shot of her corpse is actually shown, eyes shut and peaceful, almost possible to lead audiences thinking she's just unconscious. Then Mr Pheasant, who has been nothing more than a comic relief Jerkass the series beforehand, later sees what is supposedly his mate as nothing more than a roast, marking not only a proper death but an unsettling removal of the animal's humanized attributes. He is naturally traumatized, and is in turn shot as he bawls loudly.
- The scene where the animals are trying to cross the street and Mr. Hedgehog ends up freezing up on the road in fright just as the lorry is coming towards him. Mrs. Hedgehog then crosses the road and tries to get her husband to move off the road, but he refuses to move. This then leads to both hedgehogs getting run over by the lorry.
- The infamous scene (pictured above) of the butcher bird killing the Field Mice's babies by impaling them on a thorn bush. It's one of the most graphic deaths to happen in the series. Even worse is that real-life shrikes actually do this sort of thing with their prey all the time. There's a very good reason why the name of their genus means butcher in Latin.
- Mrs. Pheasant being shot dead by the farmer, and her plucked-and-roasted corpse being seen later by her husband, Mr. Pheasant. This also doubles as a huge Tear Jerker; given that Mrs. Pheasant only died because she took up the guard duty that Mr. Pheasant neglected that night, and the instant he realizes who it is, he knows. He breaks down in horrified, remorseful tears at causing his own wife's death, and Mr. Pheasant's cries end up attracting the farmer; who finds and promptly shoots him as well.
- Even when the animals finally reach White Deer Park in the second and third season, there are still some things that threatened the characters.
- Scarface is a terrifying Big Bad, being responsible for most of Season Two's death count and some of its most graphic scenes.
- After Adder kills one of his offspring, Scarface pursues her. She almost escapes into a small burrow, but Scarface manages to land his fangs on the end of her tail, and tugs onto her until he eventually snaps it off. It heals back, but still pretty unsettling to watch an animal being mutilated onscreen.
- Adder's revenge. After Fox lacked the heart to finish off Scarface, he licks his wounds next to the river, not noticing Adder swimming towards him and biting him. We get a creepy shot of him screaming and writhing in agony from the venom before he eventually succumbs.
- The scene where Sinuous, Adder's mate, ends up being killed by one of Bully the Rat's minions. How does he die? Said minion viciously strangles Sinuous to death in real-time, and you get to see his tail struggling in panic until it finally goes limp.
- The book version of Sinuous' death is worse. In the 7th book 'Battle for the Park', Sinuous was a female adder who was ambushed by Bully's rats, which surrounded the snake and bit her to death in a graphic way.
- The audio adaptation essentially makes it scary by the lack of detail. Sinuous's death opens with Bully describing how his rats found and ambushed Sinuous, and then goes on to Hurkel asking Toad if he's seen Sinuous before he realises the implications of the dead rats around him. Toad states that Sinuous put up quite a fight but the rats must have attacked in great numbers, telling Hurkel that Sinuous's body is in a bush but stating that Hurkel shouldn't have to see what the rats did to it. The scene ends with Adder sobbing as Toad informs her of her mate's death.
- The Siege of White Deer Park is, hands down, the most terrifying of the stories, to the extent that the more heavily censored third season of the cartoon just cut it out of its chronology completely rather than try to adapt it. The basic premise of the story is that a mysterious predator has moved into the park; bigger, stronger, stealthier, fiercer and deadlier than any of the native carnivores. It hunts and kills without discrimination, devouring everything from deer down to field mice. The Farthing Wood-beasts and their descendants try to find it and kill it or drive it away, but everything they do turns out to be in vain; as the Beast nimbly evades or outfights them every time. It even kills Bold's son, Husky. The only relief comes when the Beast finally decides to leave the park to answer the call of a female, which brings the realization that this means there are more of them out there.
- What is the Beast? It's nothing less than an unidentified big cat, an homage to the urban legend of there being pumas, panthers or other big cats hiding out in the wilderness of Britain. It's the very definition of an Outside-Context Problem, as the Farthing Wood-beasts have no idea what kind of animal it is; being only able to compare it to the Warden's cat but much, much larger.
