BURSTING THE BAG

I gave up driven game shooting a number of years ago in my

mid-forties because it no longer gave me a buzz. I have been lucky enough to shoot all around the UK mainland and with some fine shots, such as George Digweed. It is high time the industry realised that change must occur otherwise driven gameshooting of significant bags will suffer the same fate as the other dinosaurs.

The cost of cartridges for a day is small but the environmental price high. Many sportsmen and women like me now appreciate how much sport can be had from a shot or two with rifle or shotgun and feel the demise of the bigger days, perhaps as a result of a lead and plastic ban, could actually save our sport in the longer run.

Harry Baines, Rutland

The best suggestion I have heard concerning limiting bags comes from a letter in The Field. Each gun should be allowed a ration of cartridges for the day. At my local shoot, the average bag is about 70 birds. Given a shot-to-kill ratio of 1:3, the total number of cartridges would thus be 210. Divide this by the number of guns, say eight, and each gun has a ration of 26 cartridges – or, say, a box of 25. For a 150-bird day, 450 cartridges and eight guns equals 56 squibs each.

Under these conditions, Guns would ensure each shot counted. No gun would want to arrive at the last drive without any cartridges. There could be no ‘overkill’ – except if the shot-to-kill ratio improved.

Regarding the argument over lead or steel loads, as other writers have argued, we need to see more scientific evidence of the detrimental effect of lead. And those of us with older guns and shallower pockets would be disadvantaged by any change.

However, I suppose we could live with a change to this hymn: ‘Lead us, Heavenly Father, lead us. O’er the world’s tempestuous sea’ might become ‘Steel us, Heavenly Father, steel us ....

Rev’d Robin Hungerford Heytesbury, Wiltshire