Tories in their Butts, Lords in their Barbour’s, Beaters Serving the Guns The Battle of Britain with Peasants, Pheasants, and the Landed Gentry
Bankers with the Bonuses and their Early Retirements…..No Ifs and Buts in VEGA’s Stance: Lay Down the Guns!

1. Things in the Countryside are changing. Corporate hospitality for tired businessmen is feeling an unease that their customers especially in a recession, expect something more like a Box at a good show, concert, opera, or the ballet, or the footie at Wembley to show that Britain has more to boast than a Game Show blasting off lead over our green and pleasant land.  The Game our corporate visitors might delight in would be clubbing, not gunning, with a bit on the side for hunters in all sorts of pursuits.

2. Nor can ramblers avert their gaze and silence their curiosity as they pass unusual pens where birds are grown for the impending carnage, most of them untrained and unfamiliar with the antics of the experienced predators, Purdey-wielders and harriers of all sorts that they will contend with in their short lives at free range.  TV is beginning to catch up with plays and cinemas focussing on Shooting Parties, in one of which John Gielgud plays the memorable part of a placard-bearing veggie demonstrator.  If the shooters must practise on living targets, let loose on clay pigeons rather than for proficiency fit for urban gangsters.

3. The RSPB is beginning to take on gamekeepers who set traps and snares to catch predators of non-human species, which compete in killing game-birds.  The keepers are employed to protect their birds until the Great Day arrives for the slaughter at the opening of the appropriate season.  Further, game-shooting, unlike fox-hunting, yields edible products, which may be consumed on the estate or taken (or sold) off it; these factors enable animal welfarists to enlist NGOs and government agencies such as the Food Standards Agency and Farm Animal Welfare Council to review their responsibilities.  And with other interferences with wildlife and rearing of flocks for slaughter for meat European sensibilities can be invoked, not always with ambiguous results.  It is noticeable – and illustrated with examples on our website – that it’s the junior gamekeeper who ends up in court for illegal practices on the estates, the owners and managers evading blame and the extent of their involvement in discipline and control.

4. In the urban context a restaurant owner buying chickens at a livestock market or from a smallholder or backyard rearer may cram the birds in the boot of his car for delivery to his kitchen where he kills and butchers them for consumption of the meat by him and his family; or he sells the meat for consumption in his restaurant; or he sells the product in takeways for consumption off the premises.  The legal consequences of all this would occupy schools of barristers, so prosecutions for alleged offences get no further than on grounds of hygiene and minor animal welfare laws.  Magistrates in rural areas are likely to be more understanding in countrylore than those in an urban context dealing with the owner of a poky halal restaurant; and the police may plead difficulties that permit inaction over alleged cruelties reported on the hunting field, where cries of Tally Ho command the environment, rather than the rearming of already hot guns.

5. Anyway, August the Twelfth signals a redoubling of political activity in changing conditions and with the imminence of a General Election.  Taking a rigorous line, animal welfarists may see a rescue of anti-hunting legislation and benefit from curbs on shooting introduced in policies of sustainability, cross-compliance, and set aside, with strengthened protection for managed wildlife.  These are matters that the recession must not stifle.

6. In fact, the recession sharpens the need for scrutiny of words such as sustainability and conservation, when demography adds its demands to other factors claiming change in these crowded islands (at least of the human species and our domestics).  The excuse for shooting that “the birds at least get a taste of free range, which is more than you can say for the broiler chicken” is, regrettably, becoming flawed.  It certainly tests the veracity of the RSPB’s protective stance.  If our countryside is to be made acceptable for leisure purposes as well as serious food-production, standards of accommodation and facilities for enjoyment and respect for an abstract love of the country rather than a form of mid-Atlantic patriotism must be overhauled vigorously, in the built and rural environments.

7. VEGA’s Trustees are no spoilsports.  We have lived through contempt for changes in which the feathers in badminton shuttlecocks and the strings in racquets were replaced successfully with materials with less objectionable origins and still fit for champions.  We must express our reservations over manicured patches of land lavishly serviced with products and equipment from garden centres; and, glorious as many golf-courses may seem, they serve their pleasurable purposes at a stiff cost on the environment and conservation of resources – and these strictures could extend to some stadia and playing fields and concourses and to marinas and concentrated demands they make on means of transport and servicing.

8. So there must be no ifs or buts as this Inglorious Twelfth begins the last season before the General Election.  The politicians and commentators seem to think that apathy in the electorate will be banished by more pre-and primary voting before the final candidates reach the hustings and ballot box, rather like the  prolonged agonies of presidential elections in USA (and, probably, in some other  United States).  Blood sports must engage the electorate and the politicians as  proof of recognition of the current Veggy Swing towards thoughtful reform and  purposeful austerity in our relationships with one another and all species of life.