The guns finally fall silent after the violence of the pheasant shoot

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/08/guns-fall-silent-pheasant-shoot

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I should have known when I saw the behaviour of the pheasants, banging repeatedly against the fence, until that small-brained frenzy coincided with a gap, when they rocketed up and away. The perpetual fusillade of guns from across the other side of the Yare sounded like the Somme. One wonders if that audible violence, which is surely peculiar to the killing inflicted by industrial societies, also measures our alienation from the natural landscape? One thinks, by contrast, of the silence and stealth that must always have surrounded hunters from the Paleolithic until the middle ages.

Yet this pheasant business probably has more impact on the shape of the British landscape than all the efforts of all the environmental organisations in their entire history. I tried to imagine its key moment – that period at the end of the shoot when the guns walk down the rows of carcasses. Sometimes there are hundreds of birds. The innovation that unleashed this form of arithmetical ritual was the 1847 invention of the breech-loading shotgun. One is tempted to speculate that there is a psychological continuum that stretches from that moment to the high slaughter of modern video games and even perhaps unto Columbine: a view of killing as entertainment with numbers. Yet in real hunting should the hunter not savour death sparingly, ringfencing it with meaning and significance so that there is a genuine transaction between predator and prey.

When the guns finally fell silent and the countryside was restored to itself I was intrigued to spot a peregrine, whose own prowess probably encompasses a bird catch a day for the whole of its life. This hunter also creates vast commotion in the valley when it is in killing mood. Yet the bird was absolutely silent. It was simply sitting on a post mid-field. What was most astonishing was the way that thousands of wildfowl and waders were all around it across the field, quietly feeding while the falcon rested.

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