Times Column for 4 March
They shoot
pheasants don’t they?
By Kent Barker
My neighbour says he can always tell when the local shoot is on.
Pheasants start to congregate in his garden as if to demand sanctuary. It’s not
far from there to the spinney across the little valley where the birds are
raised and fed and from where the beaters will drive them into the air to be
blasted by a line of guns.
Michael is quite glad to know when the
shooters will be out as he has to keep his lively cocker spaniel in. Several
times previously Charley has escaped from the garden and gone to play with the
gun dogs. But, not knowing any better, his antics raise the birds too early
which infuriates the gamekeeper and the shoot master, not to mention the ‘sportsmen’
who may easily have paid £500 for their day’s activity.
So Charley has been warned that he himself
may be shot if he continues to disrupt proceedings. It’s the sort of message guaranteed
to alarm dogs and their owners.
On a couple of occasions I’ve been
confronted by men with guns as I walked my dog, Myrtle, along public footpaths.
Once we turned a corner and not five metres in front was a youth with a shotgun.
As we approached he let off both barrels. I was so surprised I screamed at him
that this was a public right of way and he had no business to be shooting
there. Instantly the tweed-suited farmer who was running the shoot appeared and
told me, politely enough, that it was his private land and they were perfectly
entitled to shoot there.
The incident got me scurrying for the internet and I quickly
discovered that – as I thought – they really shouldn’t have been anywhere near
a public footpath. Even supporters such as the British
Association for Shooting and Conservation say: “One should refrain from
shooting when a right of way is being used as this could be construed as a
common law nuisance, willful obstruction or a breach of Health and Safety at
Work Act 1974.” Their advice that ‘signs should be posted and watchers
should sound horns or whistles to stop the drive when a person is seen
approaching’ was certainly being roundly ignored.
It’s also extremely doubtful whether
they could legally shoot Charley just because he startled birds into the air –
though that might not be much comfort if they didn’t know - or simply ignored -
the law.
At the time I had no particular views on shooting. It seemed a
traditional enough pastime. It brings money into the often hard-pressed rural
economy. It’s perhaps a tad one sided – after all aiming an explosive charge
and 400 lead pellets at a relatively stupid bird that’s been startled into
taking flight is a bit of an unequal contest. But I do eat pheasant from time
to time and it probably wouldn’t have had a life in the first place if the
person who wanted to point a gun at it hadn’t paid handsomely for it to be
reared.
The anti-hunting people estimate that
up to 50 million pheasants and partridges are produced
annually so they can be shot – but only about half get that far – the rest die
of starvation or on the roads or are killed by predators. And it’s argued that
the rearing process itself uses battery farming methods which would now be
illegal for chickens.
Furthermore foxes, as well as protected
species such as badgers, otters and birds of prey, are routinely poisoned,
trapped and shot to safeguard the game birds. Tons of lead pellets and
thousands of plastic shot-gun cartridges pollute the environment. And plenty of
people are accidentally injured – shotgun deaths were averaging around 200 a
year up to 2006.
All of which seems a rather high price to pay for a
day’s ‘entertainment’. But you have to acknowledge that a lot of people do derive
a lot of pleasure from it. Thus the activity continues to divide the supporters
of ‘country pursuits’ and a fair number of rural
residents.
What does really does annoy me though, is the
contention from the shooting fraternity that either I don’t ‘understand’ the
countryside if I don’t shoot or, yet more arrogantly, that I can’t really be a
country person if I don’t support field sports. Well yes I can. And I have many
friends who’ve lived in the country all their lives who believe shooting a
sentient creature such as a pheasant is cruel.
Ultimately, perhaps, it’s not so much killing a
defenceless bird that seems morally wrong, as actually taking pleasure from it.
But that’s perhaps a more philosophical debate. In the meantime, those
pheasants that survived the winter have a few months grace until the season
starts again in October and my neighbour has, once again, to lock up his
spaniel.
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