Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Finding the right words
There is well-deserved pride in some ancient phrases and titles but is it time for us to rethink the language we use, asks Alasdair Mitchell
the job managerial, to my mind. To be scrupulously accurate, you could say that deerstalking is a fine craft, used to good effect by astute deer managers.
Respect
Part of the problem is how we signal a proper respect for the quarry. In some of my Sharpshooter columns, I have touched on the issue of pest vs game. In simple terms, pests — or vermin — tend to be treated badly, whereas game species are treasured. Game is eaten, whereas the carcasses of pests may be discarded. Game has strict close seasons; most pest species do not. The European tradition of honouring fallen game with a ‘last bite’ ceremony has much to commend it.
Should we even draw a distinction between pests and game? A fox may be seen as vermin by one person, but as an intelligent and fascinating predator by another. It has been said that a weed is simply a plant in the wrong place. The same applies to wild animals. And even then, the boundaries may be blurred.
The woodpigeon is a serious agricultural pest. It is also a worthy sporting quarry and good to eat. How should we categorise a day’s pigeon decoying? Why should we disguise the fact that we enjoy a day out in the countryside shooting pigeons?
There is always a risk in pandering to public misperceptions that are based on ignorance or prejudice. On the other hand, certain unhelpful imagery is perpetuated by the use of clumsy language that fails to move with the times. For example, up until the 1950s, written accounts of puntgunning often included mention of a ‘cripple stopper’. This was a shoulder gun used to finish off wildfowl that had been wounded by the big gun. I doubt that term would be used in public today. In a similar vein, we no longer talk of ‘breaking’ a dog; instead, we train it.
Using game for food is deemed to be acceptable to the public in a way that killing for sport alone is not. In the US, many hunters refer to ‘harvesting’ game animals. Over here, we talk about ‘bagging’ a pheasant. We might just about get away with ‘harvesting a buck’, but anyone who refers to a team of eight Guns ‘harvesting’ driven pheasants might be laughed out of court.
Sport
In North America, they use ‘fair chase’ to describe ethical hunting. Is it time we in the UK stopped using the word ‘sport’ quite so freely? The public and the media tend to regard it as a poor justification for killing
a sentient animal. As soon as they hear us using the word to describe shooting live quarry, their lips curl. ‘Sport’ is, in any case, a rather inadequate and perhaps flippant way of describing the reasons why we hunt. To some of the public, even ‘culling’ looks like a disguise for recreational killing.
Toxic
As for ‘trophy hunting’, this has become a toxic phrase. Yes, we can protest until we are blue in the face that the ethical trophy hunter is routinely traduced, but it’s like pushing water uphill. The public’s minds are closed on this. It’s getting to the point where a youngster might be wary of posting a photo of their first trout on social media. Should we fight this trend, or find a way around it?
The lesson that words matter is clear from the experience of the fox hunters. They belatedly stopped using the term ‘cub hunting’ and replaced it with ‘autumn hunting’. But the damage had been done. Too many commentators had got the idea that defenceless little fox cubs were being pursued, and the change in description appeared to be disingenuous.
In a similar vein,
I have seen media reports on driven shooting that