In America, we have many domestic producers of hunting rifles - Winchester, Remington, Weatherby, and Savage are probably the most popular.
But if you asked me to name one British gun maker, I would say, “Enfield,” and that’s it. I can’t think of anything else. And as far as I know, they only make combat rifles.
So what do they hunt with in England and Scotland? Do they use surplus Enfields over there? Do they use imported American hunting rifles?
The average bloke in the UK doesn’t, which is perhaps why you’re seeing a lot of high-end guns that appeal to the very limited portion of society that does hunt.
True enough - start shooting with a hunting rifle in most of southern England and any misses will hit the next village - but there are a lot of shotguns held by farmers and by sport shooters, both game and clay pigeon.
I believe the commonist types of gun are Berettas and Brownings but not an owner myself.
Come to think of it, you can hunt rabbit and other vermin with a .22, so I would expect farmers to have one of those around as well as their shotguns. Though I doubt they would consider it a leisure activity, more of a neccesity.
My flatmate used to be a ground beater for a Duke (or something) near Aberdeen, on one of the big hunts. Hunting, in the UK, isn’t some guy going out to shoot a deer to feed his family. It’s almost always members of the landed gentry, dressed in tweed, with flat caps, shooting pheasants, or other animals, released especially for the event (I used to share an allotment with a guy who raised pheasants from eggs specifically to release on the moors for a hunt).
I have bought water garden plants from a company that sells plants to attract animals. They sell baby ducks, that you release onto your property so that they will migrate, return in season all grown up that you may kill them.
…We don’t have so much large wild game - lots of pigeons, pheasant, partridge, rabbits and quite a few deer. Regionally, some hares, grouse, plus a list of other smaller game birds such as woodcock and snipe, but we just don’t have any wilderness.
What are the rules for owning a shotgun? Say if I wanted to keep one in my flat in Edinburgh, on the grounds that I went deer stalking from time to time (can you stalk deer with a shotgun?)
I’d love to give deer hunting a try, but as others have said it is such a minority pursuit, with unappealling class connontations, that there’s just too much activation energy to get involved over here.
Not the UK, but my ex FiL is a farmer in the Republic of Ireland and has a shotgun and a .22. No idea of the brand. He shoots rabbits, and not for sport.
He also used the shotgun to kill his two beloved dogs after they’d got the taste for killing sheep.
(He also has a rifle that his brother found hidden under the seats in a caravan he bought - which had the original sights filed off and telescopic sights welded on, presumably by a terrorist group. I asked if he reported it to the cops and he said “no, I hung it on the wall”!)