Shooting must clean up its act
NO more shielded from the effects of Covid than any other sphere of activity, game shooting is facing a challenging season.
What with the requirements of social distancing and restrictions on the size of gatherings, many shoots are scaling down their activities – and preparing to take a financial hit.
But this is as nothing compared with what they may soon be facing as a result of the RSPB heading off on a radical new tack at the weekend.
Traditionally the RSPB has confined itself to some muted grumbling about the impacts of one of the country’s most popular rural activities but now it is demanding that shoots reform their activities on a number of fronts – with the prospect, unless the shooters obey, of it marshalling its 1.2 million members to lobby for a complete ban five years down the line when a rather less sympathetic administration could well be in charge at Westminster.
Shooting enthusiasts who detect in all this the hand of BBC presenter Chris Packham are not wide of the mark. He’s a vice-president of the RSPB and has already, through his group Wild Justice, started the hare running, scaring the Government into withdrawing general licences for the control of predatory species and dragging the administration in front of the European courts for allegedly failing to assess the environmental impact of the release of thousands of non-indigenous birds into the countryside.
It’s the fate of many of these that is one of the crucial issues here: not so much the ones that are shot as the ones that are left which provide easy pickings for foxes, crows and rats, increasing their populations and raising the risk of predation on other, native species.
Then there is the other waste issue; the sheer and indefensible waste of thousands of shot birds for which there is no market, an aspect of the shooting industry which is purely a consequence of it now operating on an industrial scale.
Small, farmer-run syndicates were one thing: a largely social arrangement when farming neighbours would get together, put down a few birds and enjoy a few afternoons shooting for the pot.
But there is a world of difference between that picture and the scene now where it is by no means unusual for a day at one of the country’s more challenging shoots to cost £10,000, where mega-rich clients arrive by helicopter and where the entertainment laid on extends not merely to exquisite offerings of luxury food and drink but – as has been happening locally – the provision of what might politely be turned professional company for them.
It’s no odds to me if the owner of a shoot decides to fly in a few floozies to provide comfort and relaxation but what I really object to is the obscene waste of so many of the 47 million birds that are reared for shooting in a normal year.
Far more are shot in the course of a day than the guns are interested in taking home, with the result that thousands of birds are being routinely bulldozed into mass graves. That is an utterly unacceptable spectacle by any standard, particularly at a time when so many in this country are having to resort to food banks to keep their families fed – and one which a farmer ruefully remarked to me some five years ago the public would soon revolt against.
Pheasant meat isn’t the most exciting of ingredients but it’s lean and fairly healthy and a source of protein which is relatively cheap, given that a small number of wealthy individuals have effectively subsidised its production.
The problem is creating and supplying a market for it. I live in pheasant-shooting country and throughout the season the local butcher will be offering oven-ready birds at a fiver a brace. By the time the same birds have made their way to my sister-in-law’s butcher in Chelsea the price will have quadrupled, if not more.
Some small attempts have been made to devise a way of using all this cheap and plentiful meat by turning it into ready meals but one of the basic difficulties is that it is only available for a relatively short time – and storage costs to create a yearround frozen supply for processing would knock a hole in the economics.
I’ve no doubt that pheasant meat could be successfully marketed: the British public have repeatedly demonstrated that if the price is right they’ll eat almost anything – look at Greggs for proof of that.
But there is the additional hazard involved in selling consumers meat which may contain shot, which could unleash a tsunami of legal claims for broken teeth, dislodged crowns and accidental ingestion – and it’s no longer a sufficient defence to stick a ‘caveat emptor’ label on each pack.
And even if the shooting sector could buff up its credentials by devising a way of getting a supply of cheap and healthy protein into the food chain that’s unlikely to persuade the Packhamites – who clearly have the shooters in their sights – to call off the hunt. scrambled egg on his cap had not marked the end of his ambition to shake off every last vestige of his beginnings as a humble beat PC. As someone said, Maurice would go on social climbing until he needed oxygen.
Maurice would target any milieu which offered a route to higher social standing, including the local shooting community. He had equipped himself with a fine and expensive pair of matching 12-bores which he was immensely proud of and very fond of using. The day a report was received of a seagull entangled in an old wire fence on top of a cliff there was no messing around – as there would be now – in calling out the RSPCA, the coastguard, the fire service and (just in case) a couple of ambulances: Maurice slipped into his house, emerged with his gun case, got a PC to drive him to the location, assembled the firearm, slipped a cartridge of 5 shot up the spout and put an abrupt end to the bird’s squawking.
But while Maurice may have fancied he had joined the shooting set he hadn’t quite grasped the shooters’ code. On one of the local moorland farms there was a pond which acted as a magnet for passing mallard – and for Maurice. But not for him the challenge of taking ducks rising or descending on the wing: Maurice would hide behind a gorse bush, wait to the birds to touch down on the surface of the pond, preen themselves and start to nod off then let them have both barrels.
But the moment which earned him the most notoriety occurred the day he was invited to join a local farmers’ syndicate which operated on part of the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate on Exmoor.
The estate gamekeeper kept a flock of guinea fowl, partly for their value as anti-fox watchdogs protecting the pheasant pens, partly for their prolific ovulation rate. (They also laid lots of eggs).
This day the guns were lined up across a field as the beaters worked their way through a bamboo thicket which had been specifically planted as cover for pheasants.
One or two birds were put up and accounted for then, amid a mighty cackling and shaking of undergrowth a guinea fowl took ponderously to the sky like an overloaded Lancaster clawing itself off the tarmac at RAF Scampton en route to bomb the Ruhr.
The keeper shouted a warning: “Don’t shoot, it’s a” [BANG!] “guinea fowl!”
The bang had come from the gun of Maurice upon whom, as the unfortunate fowl flapped its last, all eyes now focussed in a truly Batemanesque moment.
Maurice was not spoken to for the rest of the afternoon. Nor – after unforgivably asking whether he could take the guinea fowl home – was he ever invited back.