It is deer hunting season in the state of PA in USA.
Whenever we have British guests here, one of the guys at work who owns lots of guns usually takes them out shooting. It is always a big hit and I am lead to believe that guns are difficult to obtain in the UK. However, one of the stereotypes of the British upper class is the fox hunt, so it leads me to believe that someone somewhere can obtain some hunting guns.
So tell me about hunting in the UK. Is it prevelent? What animals are typically hunted? How and where to you obtain your guns?
For a start foxes are not killed by guns but by dogs. Or they used to be until the law was changed last year. Shotguns ARE used for killing various game birds and wildfowl and rabbits. Rifles are used to kill deer. And that’s about it.
It is much easier to get a shotgun than a rifle, but in all cases you have to have a licence and be subject to strict rules and conditions, both over their use and storage. This is overseen by the police.
One thing to keep in mind is how small Britain is and how many people live here. We just don’t have the wilderness areas you have in the States. Even the Highlands of Scotland – the main area for deer stalking – are managed to considerable extent. If you start firing a high powered rifle across most of Britain you’re more likely to hit another person than a wild animal!
As Rayne Man points out foxes were hunted with dogs, the Hunt following on horseback, (shooting them was definitely bad form – too much danger of leaving a wounded animal suffering) but this was banned last year following a massive row in Parliament and out.
In rural areas, the ownership of guns is perhaps higher than you (and many Brits) would assume. And in such situations, it’s not very difficult to get a shotgun licence. It’s not common, but nothing to be surprised by.
Shooting a licenced gun safely on one’s own property, or with the permission of the landowner, is OK. Hence the use of shotguns to deal with pests such as pidgeons, let alone rabbits.
(Can you tell who’s loft the bastard pidgeons decided to find their way into?)
Final comment - isn’t most deer hunting in the UK actually culling, reducing the numbers to the point they’re sustainable alongside other animals?
Most deer-hunting is culling, done by professionals, but there is a fair amount of sport shooting too. Someone said it’s easy to get a shotgun licence, but it’s also fairly easy to get a licence for a rifle - you just have to keep it secured and the ammo seperate etc etc.
I realise this thread is about hunting, but your impression that guns are difficult to obtain in the UK probably comes from our stringent rules over handguns (basically you can’t have one!) as well as the fact that regular policemen are not armed (there are small numbers of specialist armed teams).
People that don’t know much about guns often don’t realize that your basic high-calibre hunting rifle is about the most powerful normal firearm you would want. If I went over there and got one, I could probably take over the countryside AND the unarmed police with just one of them.
That was touted in the papers recently as a way for farmers to diversify and earn a living when they can’t turn their land into woods for paper or golf courses.
I still don’t know what to believe - as the rabid pro-hunt crowd are as bad as the rabid anti-hunt crowd - but according to the former, the fox stands a greater chance of just being injured and crawling off to die in a hole if shot at, than it does being taken down by dogs, as supposedly the dogs are trained to make a kill on first bite. Take it all with a pinch of salt, but I can kind of see their point, abhorrent as I find the whole practice.
Interestingly though, most proponents of fox-hunting will argue that foxes are vermin, and yet are less concerned with the welfare of other vermin that need to be exterminated. The difference, I suppose, is that a rat cannot be induced to run in an interesting fashion before a pack of hounds, and a fox can. :dubious:
Bird-shooting is popular over here, principally for game birds such as pheasant, grouse and wild duck. Sometimes the highly edible end product is deliberately wasted to keep the market from becoming flooded, but I’ve been given several brace of pheasant over the years through friends and acquaintances so sometimes it works out reasonably OK. Typically the quarry is driven towards the guns rather than stalked by the shooters.
I just throw this in as a factoid that some people may find surprising - there are annual deer culls right here in London. There’s a deer population of about 1,000 in a few large public parks.
Game shooting is still very popular, and the majority of game birds available in my local shops seem to be from local shoots (most butchers will warn you that pheasant etc may contain lead shot).
It is reasonably common to own a .22 rifle - especially in rural areas - and shotguns are extremely popular with farmers and others in rural communities.
However, there’s less fetishisation of guns in the UK than in the USA, which means people are less likely to brag about their gun ownership (you don’t see pick-ups with laden gun racks driving through town etc).
Those who own shotguns etc tend to see them as a rather mundane tool of their trade, rather than a political statement or leisure accessory.
How long do you think you’d last agianst Sig Sauer P226’s and Hechler and Koch MP5’s as that what the armed cops carry. They just aren’t on the beat but are always ready to go when needed.
Wasted? Urgh, Mum would hate to hear that, we’re under standing orders to retrieve any pheasant we run over with our cars and bring them home for tea. Which is not to say we drive through forests stalking our prey…
All true except perhaps the very last two words - there are sporting gun magazines, shops that cater to the sporting gun enthusiast and so on. True that there are plenty of farmers and so on who do see them purely as vermin-control tools, but let’s not discount the sport shooters entirely.
