Mr Basil Brush
There’s never a bird on the heather,
There’s never a stag in the pass,
That can hold a man’s heart in a tether,
Like a horse and a handful of leather,
When twenty-two couple together
Are chiming away on the grass.
Ogilvie
All of our lives we are led. Even when we don’t know it, even when we think we are being brave and striding forward on our own. We are what our parents made us, shaped by our surroundings and role models; by media and school teachers and peer pressure. There is nothing wrong with that; its just the way that it is – it just sometimes makes it harder to stand back and see things for what they are. It makes it harder to ask if there is a better way.
I have hunted all of my life, as a child, as a teenage thruster, a young adult, with my children in tow and through the years when I couldn’t keep up with them any longer. I have hunted the ponies, the cobs and had good thoroughbreds beneath. I’ve served my turn as hunt supporter, a whipper-in and a master. I was there at all the marches and when the ban came in. I’ve shed the tears and fought the fights and ridden the roller coaster of hunt politics. None of that makes me special or different from thousands of people who hunt, except that those of us who have hunted for years can see the changes as they ring in a way that people who have newly joined the sport cannot.
The fight for our way of life has taken its toll in many ways – not least that it has taken our eye off the ball of the other issues facing hunting. At a time when our main concern was preventing the ban, these considerations did not seem as though they should be prioritised. A whole generation has grown up considering the fight for the continuation of our sport to be the panacea of all of our problems. Indeed a whole industry has grown up to lead us to fight the fight, first to prevent it from being banned – and now to canvass for the repeal. Jobs are at stake. Funds need to be raised, and the success of that requires simple messages and target audiences. I am not disputing that the cause is worthy – but I do think that at some level we need to start considering the other difficulties that we face today. We might have it within our power to make it better – if we just dare to ask the questions. The countryside alliance serves its role – as does the master of foxhounds association, but I am not sure that they have it within either their power or their sights to address other burning issues that we face.
Shortly after the introduction of the ban I was involved in a series of interviews with masters to try to establish their perspective of the difficulties that they encountered on a day to day basis in the running of their hunts. The results were interesting. In this article I will address just one of the subjects raised. Shooting.
Time and time again a serious problem encountered by masters was the ability to find sufficient ‘to go at’ before February 1st. To spell that one out for those who don’t recognize the date, the problem is access to country during the shooting season. Now let me speak the unspeakable: hunting and shooting are – and always have been in conflict.
As an ex-master I now find myself in the fortunate position of being able to discuss this issue openly. Both shooting and hunting are country sports – that much we have in common. Our mutual love of the open spaces and bright hard winter mornings, good company and a splash of whiskey from a faithful hip flask. But a master cannot speak the unspeakable because of the thin line that he needs to walk. It is better to be able to go after February 1st than not at all. The countryside alliance will not speak of this subject for various reasons. I could be generous at this point and say that they feel that there is little to be gained by opening up wounds between hunting and shooting. However I doubt that that would stand up to discussion since high on their agenda is their wish to convert supporters of the British Association of Shooting and Conservation to the CA insurance scheme because they would prefer these funds to be in their own coffers. Indeed instead of trying to find ways to work with BASC they have openly stated that historically the two organisations don’t see eye to eye because of an historical personal conflict. It concerns me that the best interests of their membership may not be being served for such a reason. The conflict between shooting and hunting is something that is whispered about by masters, we all play a game of dishonesty pretending that all is fine. In every letter for public view we thank landowners and keepers for their unstinting support, and in our hearts we just wish it was really the truth.
Now that doesn’t mean that hunting and shooting cannot work together. It doesn’t mean that the situation could not be improved. But it does mean that there is a conflict of interest that for the sake of some discussion and thought could be at least better understood and possibly improved upon.
The conflicts are really two fold. (Now before I go any further I want to be clear that what I’m talking about here is hunting – it is not ‘not hunting’. So please feel free to set this in your mind in whatever era you chose.)The first conflict is for land. Pheasants are kept in the same coverts that hounds would wish to draw. They are expensive to rear and they need to be around on the day that the shoot goes through. Hounds shake them up and make them fly, in much the same way that they do on a shooting day when spurred on by spaniels and beaters. They can be settled again and lured back into covert – but it requires management and the skill of the keeper to do so. Shoots can be big business and their view point must be respected.
The second conflict is our quarry. Foxes need to be managed if there is to be a healthy count of pheasants at the close of a shooting day. This is part of the job of gamekeepers. I think none of us would dispute that a troublesome fox is better dealt with. But should it be the case that a keeper is viewed to have failed if a fox is spied on a days shooting? There was a time when any landowner would have been appalled had his land not held a rich balance of wildlife – and a time when he would have been ashamed had there not been healthy foxes in covert when the hunt crossed his land.
Shoots come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. There are relatively low cost walked up farmers shoots. They do not put large numbers of birds down, they are not intensively reared, and they don’t expect much more than they can take for the pot at the end of a days shooting. At the other extreme there are large scale commercial shoots were thousands of birds are put down, full time keepers are employed, beaters are used on shooting days and the amount of money earned is related directly to the number of birds shot. The latter are big business.
In discussions about shooting it is the money that is often le coup de grace. How can we argue with it? I think that the answer to that is that bearing in mind the current profile of hunting then it is hard to argue. Shooting brings much needed money into the countryside and it puts some of it into the hands that we would like to see benefiting. I do have a few questions though, which go like this:“Why is it that when you ride through heavily commercial shooting grounds post 1st February does it remind me of Rachel Carson’s ‘silent spring’?
Not just no foxes. But no nothing, except for the odd pheasant waiting to be caught up. Not even a song bird. Can that be right? Are landowners not the guardians of the land?"
Talking to young keepers I think that part of the problem comes from their training. If they are taught to respect wildlife perhaps they will. If they are allowed to be trigger happy then that will surely be the path they will follow.
“Why is it that some commercial shoots are able to work perfectly satisfactorily with hunts whereas others seem unable to do so?”
Talking to young keepers I think that part of the problem comes from their training. If they were taught to respect wildlife perhaps they would. If they are allowed to be trigger happy then that will surely be the path they will follow. But not all keepers are so ‘efficient.’ On a neighbouring estate it would not be unusual to see a vast over population of rabbits.
Foxes hunt rabbits. If you see land over populated by rabbits then you can be fairly sure that there are no foxes left to keep them in check. A keeper will tell you that they cannot kill the last fox, and it is under the cover of those frequently uttered words that they find the justification to try.“Why is a day’s commercial shooting measured by the number of birds killed?”
Why could it not be measured by other aspects as well. The honour of taking a high bird, how well they flew, the camaraderie, the shoot supper. Perhaps we are lucky in this country that there is no restriction yet on the number of birds that one man can kill in a day. Perhaps we are not? Perhaps shooting needs to address this issue before it becomes a matter that is forced upon them. 'Organic green' and 'sustainable' are major buzz words that shooting may actually benefit from trading on? The last thing in the world that any of us needs would be an opening of the can of worms that goes with producing a successful days shooting by the standards of today’s measurement – I won’t go there. But then I won’t need to, the clock ticks for them anyway.
I don’t pretend to have the answers, I probably don’t even have all of the questions – but I do have the will to start asking them. I ask them not just for the future of hunting, but also for the future of the British countryside. If we have the will to hunt and to enjoy its bounties, then just perhaps we also have a duty to care for their future. We fought for hunting for our children and our grandchildren. If we want our fight to be worth something then just maybe we need to start to find ways to step one step further than the lessons our leaders give us. Perhaps we need to take a long hard look at the problems that face us and start to ask ourselves how to solve them, because at the moment we do not have an umbrella organisation that is positioned to be able to.
Next edition: Boundaries
Mr B. Brush