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Slow life

Alex James

Wednesday, 12th November 2008

Flying high

The beaters approached through the trees, the odd woof and the odd whistle. Nothing, nothing, nothing and then bang, bang, kerbang: wave upon wave of pheasants rushing overhead. Dogs dashing, guns blazing, insults flying like bullets, birds flailing and falling. Total exhilaration.

By the time we stopped for soup and sherry, I’d hit half a dozen birds, better than I thought I’d manage all day. The hangovers were gone and it felt like Christmas morning. One of the party had managed to tickle a trout from the stream in-between drives and it sat alongside the crates of birds in the back of the gamekeeper’s jeep. The weather was improving, the sun was just reaching over the treetops on the far side of the valley, warming us in gold. There really is no finer way to get lunch.

Shooting has been a fast-growing sport over the past decade and it was a big industry to start with. Like violins, which they remind me of somehow, guns cost exactly as much as you want them to, from a hundred pounds to more than a house. The clothes aren’t cheap, the accessories endless. It takes a huge amount of resources to raise and shoot a pheasant: acres and acres of well-maintained Grade I English countryside, a fully staffed castle, a vast organisation of gamekeepers, beaters, loaders, dog trainers, dog handlers and shooters. It struck me in the butcher’s the other day, as I looked at the neat rows of game birds, that they had all probably been shot by company directors, CEOs, billionaires and toffs, taking the day off work and paying a huge amount for the privilege. Game is about the best bargain going and it’s hard to think of how an animal could be more ethically reared, or how it could be any more expensive.

This is what it takes to put a pheasant, a grouse, a red-legged partridge, a snipe or a woodcock on the table. It is never done any other way. Most of the pheasants shot in this country are eaten in France, not thrown away as some people believe. I have only one question. Why would anyone eat chicken instead?