ANGLING AND SHOOTING

[far bank stalker]

I used to work with a guy who was very anti. He would sound off at great length(particularly at me) on how "cruel" it was to go out shooting rabbits or birds.

With his next breath he would regale us with stories of how he had been out the previous night for a Chicken Tika Marsarla.

I'm not sure where he thought the chicken came from but in those days I was pretty sure where my meat came from.

Alas, these days not able to shoot anymore but I still try to buy meat where I know the history.

Today at the market I bought chicken and guinea fowl from the farmer who hatched and produced them

i suspect i am more inarticulate than 'anti' really. i am surprisingly un-anti. i get rabbits from one of the local old boys. it's more a general moan about the age we live in and the way money has replaced effort. it's a very diffuse moan and whenever i'm called to task on it i mumble and look foolish.

 

the only form of hunting i really don't like is fox hunting, but thats just because i feel it has nothing to do with hunting for some of the participants, never the less it doesn't offend me enough to really do anything about it, so....

 

the thing about karma was not really meant to be a direct link to either the souls of hunters or mine, just an abstract way of saying not everybody's in it for the same reasons. there are a myriad of reasons our friends and associates pursue these sports, most are good, but way too diffuse to pin down, how do you explain to somebody that doesn't understand that something strong draws you to water? that there you find peace with a crazy world? but some reasons are not so good, and these are the people who damage the reputations and fabric of these sports

 

most of all though i was interested to discuss the whole thing and its cool to see that even in three fairly opposed views there is common ground

[far bank stalker]

Sounds as if all you got out of the deal was the fun of shooting the pigeons - you didn't eat them, you didn't get paid for killing them and it wasn't your crop they were eating. Not sure how that stacks up with;

 

"essentially it's a bit like karma, it's not what you do, it's the intent behind what you do"

 

Don't really see a difference in motivation between you doing that and others hunting foxes or shooting deer.

erm...we got paid in shells. last i remember shells cost money. they were destined for the table in france, at that time in Britain pigeon was considered trash by anyone not living in the country, and i think your suggesting that doing the farmer the favour that we were was wrong because we didn't own the land? maybe the farmer didn't either, maybe he was a tennant farmer i don't know. whatever the pigeons had to go. the deer didn't. deer do not come under the label 'vermin' in the same way as say squirrels, rats, pigeons etc....

 

Behind the 'trophy hunting' scene you will find a bunch of professional stalkers, who routinely cull deer in the time honoured way. i genuinely don't care if people hunt deer or not, the deal is though that this was an unusual set of circumstances right? otherwise it wouldn't have made the national (and international?) media