RURAL THUGS GET KILLING AGAIN

On Tuesday, the partridge shooting season began. The birds, literally millions of them, have been bred and reared as live targets for sport.

One of the things that is little mentioned about shooting at live birds for sport is the level of cruelty involved. The flying birds are shot at with shotgun pellets, which often do not kill outright. The pellets can disable with the bird then crashing to the ground, sometimes to be killed on impact, sometimes unable to fly and seeking to find cover. Other times the birds are only slightly wounded and glide or fly on only to come to grief far away from the shoot.

At a typical shoot there are twice as many shots fired as there are birds downed. This is not precision humane killing, it is haphazard wounding and winging for sport, with a pretty ramshackle and only partial clean up operation using gun dogs to follow. The image that the shooting industry tries to present – of expert marksmen and women killing birds humanly for the pot – is just not borne out by the facts.

The fact that the vast majority of those who shoot to kill for sport are men over the age of forty should not be ignored. Shooting as a sport appears to appeal to men as some sort of power fantasy: killing as an exercise in dominance. The chance to exercise the power of life and death, the claim to be a proficient killer and the chance to demonstrate prowess as a hunter killer, seems to strike a machismic chord in those who shoot for sport. In a civilised society we really ought to question the sense in allowing and/or facilitating the use of guns as a power fantasy.

As a society we send very conflicting messages when on the one hand we criminalise violence to and the unnecessary killing of domestic and farmed animals while at the same time we allow the killing of wild animals with guns for sport. We send out equally confusing messages when we deplore gun culture amongst young criminals, but at the same time license children and adults to use shotguns and firearms to kill wild animals for sport.

It is still legal to hold a firearm certificate in the UK for an elephant gun. Why on earth do we need to allow people to acquire huge and lethal firearms that cannot possibly be needed in the UK? The woolly mammoths died out a long time ago, wild rhinos no longer roam here, yet there are people in the UK with firearms allegedly needed to kill animals that are on the endangered species lists and/or extinct.

There is no doubt that, to roughly quote Chairman Mao, power comes from the barrel of a gun. We have to ask ourselves if we want an armed citizenry, as there is in the USA and elsewhere, bearing arms and indulging in power and dominion fantasies using their firearms?

There is plenty of evidence to support the Socratic dictum that vice harms the doer. Rousseau said that the act of killing coarsens the sensibilities of the killer. The concern for life is diminished by killing the duty of care, which is put to one side in pursuit of an unnecessary indulgence for sport. Do we really want this? I think not.

Predictably this week when a coroner recommended, and the BMA agreed, that doctors should note on their files if a patient had applied for or held a shotgun or firearm, the shooters opposed the idea.

The supporters of shooting oppose any medical revocation of firearms. Doctors already as a matter of routine report to the authorities if they believe someone is no longer fit to drive a car; the same process should apply to firearms. It is grossly irresponsible that the shooting industry does not to support the coroner’s recommendation which followed an inquest on a person who having expressed suicidal tendencies to his doctor then shot and killed his wife and child before killing himself.

To my mind anyone who causes unnecessary suffering is an abuser. When that unnecessary suffering is explained as being a sport and the suffering of the target animals is as naught, I think that is abuse. People have a responsibility for the welfare of the animals that they interact with. To chase, to harry, to injure and to kill for sport is an abuse of that responsibility because it is deliberately not being done humanely.

If the intention of the bloodsports enthusiast was to kill only when necessary and then humanely, they would not do what they do. The shoots would be closed down, the reared pheasants and partridges would be killed humanely and not released into the countryside, the hunted animals would not be chased by packs of dogs and the terriermen would not be using their dogs to bait foxes below ground. Bloodsports by self definition are cruel sports; name it and shame it is my advice.