Country Mouse
As the cottage windows rattle, the sweet melody of a robin, singing from deep within a dripping fir tree, is drowned out by the rumble of big guns firing on nearby Salisbury Plain and the racket from a neighbouring pheasant shoot.
‘Today, pheasant-keeping maintains the fabric of the countryside and, by providing an alternative crop, it limits the excesses of prairie farming,’ claimed the late Cambridge ecologist Oliver Rackham in The History of the Countryside (1986).
Nevertheless, as I toss another home-grown log on the fire, I shudder with relief that, during these grim, dark days, I myself am no longer involved in manly blood sports. Unwilling to take lessons, or buy a shotgun, my impecunity precluded returning hospitality on the shooting front. Moreover, I remained stubbornly a perpetual novice.
‘He [the novice] hears a continuous rolling fusillade all round, and smells the sulphurous smoke as it drifts through the underwood and thinks to himself, “Those fellows are having a fine time; I shall be behindhand”, and so blazes away, hoping to make up by rapid firing for bad aim’ – A Plea for Pheasant Shooting by Richard Jefferies
I have enjoyed some shoots. There was the fruit farmers’ friendly shoot in Norfolk and the socialist shoot in the heart of England where the beaters joined the guns for luncheon. ‘Most extraordinary…’ kept muttering a Nouveau Gun in an Armani shooting suit. He couldn’t grasp the concept that, as in the racing world, ‘all men are equal over the turf and under it’.
I did enjoy the time I inexplicably ‘connected’ with a high pheasant at Wemmergill alongside a party of BowesLyon crack shots. The bird fell with a thud at the foot of Lord Goschen, who expressed astonishment.
But mostly it was a series of misconnections. And, since I was invariably pegged in the most conspicuous position, I suffered horribly the sullen, disappointed glares of the beaters. Moreover, I could never quite master the agreeable banter with other guns between drives.
All field sports are on the back foot these days.
‘Pheasant-shooting?’ Non-combatant countrymen would challenge Jefferies, typically complaining, ‘Mere slaughter, sir, tame as barn-door fowls! Contemptible! All you have to do is blaze away.’
Now, 140 years later, the same views are often held by the townies relocating into country villages who cannot yet understand the concept of gamekeeping. Pheasant-shooting can actually help songbirds and hedgerow birds to survive.
Mark Avery, an EX-RSPB man, author of a masterly and persuasive polemic Inglorious (2015), on the vexed issue of raptor persecution surrounding driven grouse shoots, holds no brief against pheasant shoots, but struggles to find a plus point in the ‘sport’ of shooting.
‘Driven grouse shooting seems to me, in sporting terms, a bit like an outdoor version of a computer game such as Pac-man or Space Invaders, and what it amounts to is essentially using live animals as target practice; so why not clay pigeons?’ It’s a fair cop, guv! At best, driven pheasant shooting – at the risk of appearing in Pseud’s Corner – could be described as simply a highly formalised ritualistic display of co-operative effort, during which we dress up in tweed to disguise our innate beastliness.
It could equally be described as a homage to our common huntergathering ancestry which, romantics maintain, existed in a state of grace before mankind took the tragic ‘wrong turn’ of agriculture. In the current woeful crisis of masculinity, the alternative to denying our innate beastliness was highlighted in a recent episode of Celebrity Island. Starving celebrities, in a grotesque display of gutlessness, performed a bizarre sea burial of a dead pig, who had died of natural causes, rather than eat it, out of ‘respect’ to the vegetarian celebrity who had bonded with the pig as a pet.
A well-run pheasant shoot is exhilarating and, for those who have yet to hear the strange yelps and ululations, the ‘music’ of the rhythmic beating of sticks, to drive the half-witted creatures out of their bramble thickets towards the guns, is a singular experience.
It has been said that ‘a statesman must be a sportsman’. Everyone knows that some of our most successful financial men and, covertly today, some of our politicians are thorough sportsmen. No doubt they derive an elasticity of spirit from moor and river that stands them in good stead when they want to ‘think outside the box’ in civilian life. One wonders how many Brexit negotiators are sportsmen.
Still, I have a moral dilemma concerning other men’s pheasants. A sample selection of the nation’s 41 million free-range pheasants finds my bio-reserve much to its liking. As the dark silhouette looms onto a branch, my trigger finger trembles.
I need it for the pot. But I am minded of a passage from T H White’s Burke’s Steerage, concerning the taboo about sitting shots. ‘It is a taboo created in order to save the shooter pain. If he destroys a sitting pheasant, he has merely destroyed beauty, and some twinge of that young boy’s emotion, which he once was, will return to plague the inventor: but, if he destroys it in its full glory on the wing, he can smother this remorse under the other beauty of his successful aim.’