Murder most fowl

Press, 8 March 1989, Page 20

Murder most fowl

From the “Economist,” London

AS THE pheasants in England settle down to breed, a booming leisure industry has just closed for the season. The nouveaux riches have taken to pheasant shooting. The nouveaux pauvres, who used to be the landed rich, are selling off their ancient privilege of standing in the cold and potting small birds. Prices range up to 3NZ5772 a head a day. But while commercial shooting lines the landowners’ pockets, it also ignites furious arguments. Renting out shooting, to companies and wealthy individuals, is a sizeable business. A 1981 estimate put it at $NZ1154.4 million a year. Since then the squeeze on agricultural subsidies has encouraged landowners to look for ways to boost their incomes. Last autumn the Government decided to pay farmers not to grow crops. As shooting requires uncultivated land, and can use it profitably, this policy may commercialise the sport even more. Roxton Sporting, an agency in Hungerford which introduces businessmen to established shoots whose owners want to defray some of the costs, says that it arranged 150 days’ shooting five years ago, and now deals with 600. Other companies, like Sportselect near York, rent shooting rights and organise the

operation themselves. Agencies provide all the frills, down to the last Bendicks Bittermint, but the quality of the shooting and the number of birds shot determine what the punters are prepared to pay. A good shoot is one in hilly countryside patched with woodland, where the birds fly high. On the best estates clients pay up to $NZ63.49 for killing each pheasant, though butchers pay only $NZ5.77 for its corpse. The bag can be anywhere from 100 birds a day to over 1000. Estates tend to shoot ten or a dozen days a year, usually with eight guns a day. Since most of the costs of a shoot — employing a gamekeeper, keeping down pests, maintaining woods — are fixed, the larger the day’s bag, the more money the landowner makes. Most pheasants are reared, so supply can be increased to meet demand. Ten years ago around 6 million pheasants were shot each year. In 1987 12 million were shot. The arguments ricocheting around the shooting world concern those numbers. When bags get too big, it seems, ordinary decent killing becomes slaughter and shooting looses an ingredient essential to British sport: fair play. That upsets resentful gentry priced out of their sport, and also

those worried about the future of shooting. The January issue of the “Field,” the blood-sportsman’s bible, sounded a trumpet blast against big bags: "The sport of shooting is a response to healthy instincts inherent in humanity, governed by conventions of decency towards the quarry ... but grotesque and objectionable artificialities are now being introduced, to threaten the repute of the original sport.” It cited unnamed villains who, instead of freeing reared birds in their infancy so that they become semi-wild, release flocks of adult birds on the morning of the shoot. These worries spring not just from a refined sense of rural compassion. After all, Edward VII, a monarch if not a gentleman, used with his friends to bag 4000 in a day. But these days, shooting people are afraid that massive slaughter will increase opposition from supporters of animal rights. Some environmentalists see no harm in sensible shooting. But the greenish European Parliament last year passed a resolution in favour of strict controls on shooting and limits on the size of bags, and sent it on to the Commission. The shooting lobby is feeling hunted. Copyright — The Economist