Game birds and cooking programmes

Hi Cartimunda

I know where you are coming from.   Fox hunting .....oh I could go on for hours on this one! I will endeavour to hold back..........but.....no it's no good I have to go on!

I understand that foxes carry rabies.  I understand that foxes kill livestock, I understand they can run rife and cause untold damage and I have seen the devastation they cause when they kill livestock but don't actually eat it.

What I really don't understand is why there is a need to run the animal to the ground over miles of field and then let it be ripped to pieces by a pack of dogs.  If the animal is a problem then shoot it, it is a quick death and the episode is done within minutes. What is th purpose of making the poor thing suffer......miles away from home, if it is female, away from its cubs.

I'll never forget when we had a car accident 360 miles from home, luckily we were unhurt but the car was a right off.  Not having much luck with the insurance company or the breakdown company we were members of, the police called another breakdown company to help us out.  The guy who turned up lived locally in Exmouth and was due to finish work a couple of hours after the call out but he offered to take me and my partner and the car all the way home to the Essex coast (about 5 hours each way). We spent many of the hours talking about nice, conversational general things, when the guy got onto the subject of fox hunting.  To cut the story short he was pro fox hunting...aware we still had 200 miles to go before we reached home and it was going to cost us nothing, my mouth was chewing buttons not to say anything that would cause us to be chucked out the recovery vehicle.   I fumed all the way home staring daggers into the head of the driver. My OH, knowing how I felt, kept interrupting the conversation with "oh look there's a dead shoe on the motoroway how very interesting" and "did you see that .....I'm sure that was a kestrel sunbathing"

I agree with you both as regards fox hunting and hunting for 'pleasure' in general! I just can't understand how they can get enjoyment out of it. Alas the so called ban doesn't seem to have stopped hunting here... there are even reports of hunts going through a local nature reserve a few times, without permission of course!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone - have thoroughly enjoyed this thread.   it's a very hard one to call personally I was reared in the country and we ate more or less anything that moved and could be caught and I too struggled to save lambs at birth only to fatten them to send them to slaughter for meat - sounds horrific to me now.   I suppose years ago we only hunted for our personal needs and I think there was a healthy respect for all living creatures even those we ate.   I think Blackbird is saying we are all more 'civilised' now and should judge wisely what we choose to call 'food' and make sure that those animals reared for meat and treated humanely at all stages of their lives.  No we dont need to eat woodcock, teal or many other items on the menu!  TV just wants to shock and upset us and thats what it has achieved with this programme.    Fox Hunting - I took my children to a nature reserve some years ago and part of the land was leased out and we had to witness fox hunting going on whilst we were there (the people were all from the city there just for the joy of killing something) we left early because the girls were so distressed.

Something different but similar occurred yesterday - my neighbour who is in his eighties was clearing out his garage and knows my great love of nature and so presented me with a small box containing two birds eggs that he had collected as a small boy one of which was a cuckoo's egg I cannot decide whether I am pleased to have these or not!  I know they were blown 70 years ago so there is nothing I can do but cant quite get my head round 'owning' them.

Sorry if I have gone on and digressed - here's a laugh when I came in with the eggs my mum in law asked what they were (she is nearly 90) and when I told her - her reply was that was nice of him are you going to boil them?

Lol! I prefer mine scrambled personally! ;-)

The eggs were collected so long ago that you might as well enjoy just them...It's like old ivory (not the modern stuff as that's another thing that riles me!), the elephant has already unfortunately been killed long ago and it makes it almost seem a sacrifice for nothing if it's thrown away...I would never buy it, but if I were to be given some, I would look after it.

lucybob said:

I think Blackbird is saying we are all more 'civilised' now and should judge wisely what we choose to call 'food' and make sure that those animals reared for meat and treated humanely at all stages of their lives.  No we dont need to eat woodcock, teal or many other items on the menu! 

That I agree with fervently!

I see your dilemma Lucybob - but after all this time, it's probably a bit late now :-)  Re the foxhunting - although a 'townie' myself, both my and my husband's parents (and grandparents) were very much traditional countryfolk with their own smallholdings where they kept pigs, chickens (and indeed rabbits in the case of one of my great-grandmothers, apparently!) for their own consumption. However, not one to my knowledge ever had anything good to say about "the hunt" and indeed regarded them with disgust, having ridden roughshod (literally!) over their land and crops (like many people back then, their land was rented and the permission to hunt was given by the landlords, not the tenants). So folks who say it's a town v. country issue are totally wrong and it's one of the things that really gets my goat when people say that it is! Grr!

A lot of the hunts and shoots in our area are no longer how can I say this 'no longer for the local gentry'  but make a lot of money from people outside of the community paying for a days hunting or shooting as they do paintballing etc.  Not making myself very clear - when I was a kid hunting and shooting was very localised whether or not you agreed with hunting but I think an added distate has come folks from wherever paying over the odds for their sport.  The incident I referred to at the nature reserve I complained about on the day and was told that the people had been coached in from a large city (hence my reference) to enjoy a days hunting.   The hunt was banned on the grounds near where I lived in Montgomeryshire because of the very fact that you have made they were ruining th ground and were most disrespectful to the tenant farmers.  I had great pleasure one day in telling the hunt they couldn't pass across my land to follow the fox and when their dogs landed in my orchard and starting feeding on the scraps I had put out for the birds I took great even pleasure in taking my time in fetching the dogs back up on to the road to the main hunt!   I was not making an issue of town v country it hadn't crossed my mind really in my younger days I would stand and fight town or country person who followed the hunt but am too old in the tooth now and just sit and seethe.  Did you hear David Cameron's comments the other morning about the hunt?  Perhaps we had better leave it there. 

This is a very interesting thread and I agree with so much of what's been said.

I live in a hamlet in SW France and have an enthusiastic hunter living next door. Every Thursday and Friday you can hear the guns going off in the surrounding area. My neighbour has a licence to kill boar and deer as well as rabbits, hares etc. I know that he can only kill a certain number of these, but I hate the idea of killing because 'we have the right to do so since the French Revolution'! I've seen rabbits just thrown into ditches and not taken for food.

I know it's a different way of life and of thinking from that in the UK, but it still doesn't make killing animals and birds right.