What’s for dinner, Mum? Whatever I’ve shot today!
Hunter feeds family for a year with her kills (and she used to be a veggie)
AS FAR as the average family shopping list goes, it is perhaps a little unorthodox.
In the past year, Rachel Carrie has fed her family with four deer, 80 pheasants and partridges, 40 ducks and more than 125 pigeons – all of which she shot herself.
Miss Carrie, 35, has shot and butchered the family’s meat for ten years – despite being a vegetarian as a child.
While families across the country may sit down to a midweek meal of chicken fajitas, Miss Carrie has substituted the chicken for a partridge she has caught.
She says her lifestyle of ‘field to fork’ is ethical, and vegans who denounce her need to think twice about the environmental impact of their own diets. When
‘I butcher the game myself’
not hunting, Miss Carrie – who has a 32-year-old partner Mark and a teenage son – works as an environmental impact assessor to reduce food waste. She lives in a barn- conversion in Yorkshire, and hunts to fill the fridge with the consent of farmers and landowners.
‘You can taste the difference immediately between shop-bought chicken and game,’ she said. ‘I can’t buy into the idea of shop-bought meat. The horse meat scandal showed people did not know what they were eating.
‘Kids are eating meat and not knowing pork from a pig or beef from a cow.
‘We keep reading about abattoirs and I could no longer keep getting shopbought meat. I butcher the game myself and when my freezer is empty or I am low on stocks, I will go out again.
‘The whole point of stalking is for the deer to have never known you were there. It makes it much more ethical – unlike a cow who is expecting to be slaughtered.’
As a seven-year- old, Miss Carrie was a vegetarian, but changed her mind at the age of 12 when her father got a Harris’s hawk.
She said: ‘ Mum would make rabbit stew with the rabbits that dad caught with his hawk. I wouldn’t eat meat or shop-bought beef or chicken but I would quite happily sit and eat rabbit stew. I was quite at home with eating something where I had seen where it lived.’
She added: ‘Game is not only more ethical it’s also a much healthier alternative to intensively farmed animals. Compared to chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and grouse are higher in protein, higher in selenium while lower in cholesterol and fat.’ Nick Palmer, of Compassion in World Farming UK, told The Sunday Times: ‘We feel it is good if people eat less or no meat, but if they are going to eat meat, let’s have it done on the basis that it is not wasted and not produced cruelly.’