Many of the early figure sets from Airfix were intended for model railways rather than war games, and a case in point is this one of farm animals. Still soldiers have to eat, and anything in this set could find itself in the rations if the situation was bad enough, although perhaps we might hope that the dog escapes such a fate!
This set is made up of:
- Horse
- Pony
- Pig
- Calf
- Cow (2 poses)
- Bull
- Sheep (lying down, standing and a ram)
- Sheep Dog
- Chicken
Clearly Airfix were thinking of British farms when they designed this set, though all of the animals would be found in other parts of the World. The sculpting is nicely done and the detail pretty good. Though we are no experts on animals, everything looks okay to us, but the general appearance of the larger animals strongly suggests a recent date - perhaps the last three centuries or so. This is because such animals, especially if kept by humans, were naturally a lot smaller and thinner than the animals that we see today. Generations of genetic modification and selective breeding have produced very meat-heavy, large creatures like these, which the medieval man would not have recognised. Obviously they are fine for any railway layout of any period, but further back in history some are not authentic. To our novice eye the sculpting looks very good and realistic for the present day, and there is very little flash to be trimmed, though this may well vary considerably depending on the age of each example. The big problem with four-legged animals is the space between their legs - not so bad when you have cavalry horses in full flight, so all these animals too are moving, or lying down. Nonetheless there is some extra plastic between some legs where this is difficult to achieve, like the horse, though the problem was inevitable.
None of the creatures has a base except for the chicken, but all stand up well and are reasonably stable. A potentially useful set to enhance some countryside or camp scene, Farm Stock is very rare these days as it went out of production quite early on. Still when an army wants its food fresh, this set provides a good variety of tasty options.