Quite sporting…

Sporting Gun is never going to displace Birdwatch, British Birds or British Wildlife from my affections but I am thinking of subscribing just to keep an eye on the more moderate and sensible end of shooting.

A friend who shoots (yes – imagine it!) brought me back a copy from the Game Fair – they were giving them away! And I’ve been having a look through it. It’s distinctly a cut above The Shooting Times and streets ahead of Shooting Gazette but I’m not that au fait with the vast number of shooting magazines that are clearly competing for the hard-won pounds of the average shooter. And that’s part of the problem, there are too many mags chasing too few subscribers and many are becoming more strident in their so-called news coverage in order to stand out from the crowd.

So it was quite a relief to read in Matt Clark’s editorial:

We may not agree with Wild Justice but its opposition helps us to look more critically at that we do. After all, there will be more challenges to our sport from all sorts of organisationsand we must be prepared. Nothing good can come of name-calling, or antagonisation: diplomacy and reason, backed up with evidence, is the way forward.

That sounds refreshingly sensible, and I guess it was written before the Game Fair ‘uninvited’ Chris Packham and me from the event, and BASC branded us both ‘extremists’. i was planning to have a chat to Sporting Gun‘s editor Matt Clark at the Game Fair but that wasn’t to be: another time I hope.

On the same and adjacent page there was a commentary on the general licences which fairly quoted Wild Justice’s comments. Also there was coverage of the British Game Alliance which claimed it was bringing game into the twenty-first century (unfortunately with nineteenth century ammunition until Waitrose intervened).

Later on we find Langholm Moor is for sale and that Yorkshire Water is under pressure to drop grouse shooting from its land.

We learn that the Game Fair is happening and there are pages of adverts for guns that all look much the same to me in my ignorance.

I like the caption to a photo of a cock Pheasant which says ‘shooting is about standards not bag size’ but I wonder how shared a view that is.

Apparently the British Game Alliance is a ‘real opportunity to promote great British produce’ – and I would agree with that much more if shooting got its act together, dropped lead ammunition , reduced Pheasant release numbers, stopped pretending that Hen Harriers need grouse shooting to survive and greatly reduced raptor persecution all round. Is that going to happen? Are even moves going to made in the right direction?

There is a very interesting 2-page article on pigeon shooting which seems to me to be quite accurate in its lampooning of Natural England. There are some real issues to sort out on the general licences

There are a couple of pages on Red Grouse shooting which give a good historical perspective and don’t say anything too inflammatory or controversial – I could have written them.

Then I flicked through several pages on technique – shooting technique – which I will never need to master but were actually quite interesting. The bits on eye dominance are of interest to anyone using a telescope.

By the way, I always look at the advert for Kite Optics and wonder whether it really is a Red Kite sitting on that gun barrel, but I asked a friend, and on balance, we agree it is (although it should either be Red Kite or red kite but not red Kite – obvs!).

Then there is quite a bit on dogs which maybe would interest Chris Packham but left me cold. Readers’ letters are always interesting. Wild Justice even got to reply to one of them. One correspondent seems not to have a good grasp of the GWCT Salisbury Plain experiment: a fine piece of work, particularly for its time, but one which does not allow us to identify the impact of different predator species on anything. I don’t mean to be perjorative but the treatment was ‘kill everything that it is legal to kill’ and the control was ‘don’t’ and that clearly cannot differentiate between the impacts of mammalian and avian predation. All these years later we know, I do think we know, that the impacts of mammalian predation are far greater than those of avian predation, and if we look at corvids, the impacts of Carrion/Hooded Crows are far greater than those of say Jackdaws or Jays on bird populations. The GWCT disguised this in their response to the consultation response to Defra (in what I regard to be quiet a shockingly sly manner) – see the Wild Justice blog which takes the GWCT response apart, scientifically.

As we get further towards the back cover then the adverts increase (as they seem to in Birdwatch), the technical content increases (as it does with Birdwatch) and I found I was pretty stumped on the crossword (Birdwatch should have one – maybe I’ll suggest it)!

Could I cope with reading Sporting Gun every month? Yes, I really think I could. I would learn quite a lot and I think my faith in the morals and rectitude of ordinary shooters would get a bit of a boost too. I think I’ll try it. I wonder what the editor of Sporting Gun would make of Birdwatch – maybe I’ll ask him.

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