The countryside should be a place of life, not of death

This is the time of year when I am irritated by the pop-pop of shotguns near my house in Over Stowey. Not that West Somerset is a great county for shooting. It is a place for hunting. I have counted up to 13 packs of hounds in the neighbourhood. Most of them are foxhounds, and there are staghounds too, of course, but also beagles and harriers not so far away. I favour hunting as the best way of solving difficult problems — keeping down foxes which kill chickens for fun, and dispersing the red deer, which otherwise congregate in scores and can kick to pieces a big field of turnips in 24 hours. So I am glad that the legal ban on hunting has not worked.

Shooting birds for sport is a different matter. There seems to me something odious about raising pheasants just so well-fed City types can play the country gent by killing them. There is no danger, as in hunting, and not much skill required either. Just money. And whereas there is something quaint, even poetical, about the famous huntsmen of yore, like John Peel and Squire Osbaldeston, or even the late Duke of Beaufort, celebrated ‘guns’ as they like to be called, they inspire little sympathy. Indeed how can one love a man who likes to see himself as a living embodiment of a lethal weapon — a very dangerous and inefficient one too, which hasn’t really changed since the 16th century — that is liable to overheat and blow your hand off. The very smell of a shotgun makes me feel sick, which my old army Lee-Enfield, Bren and Sten gun never did.