BY JOHN NASH

On Monday 18th November, by an amazing coincidence just in time to confuse Farmer’s Day on the 19th, YouGov published a survey, “Where do the British public stand on hunting?”  

The short answer is they don’t – their ability to stand on hunting approximates that of standing a drunk worm on end.

It makes for interesting reading, mainly because it illustrates the total pig-ignorance of the British public on hunting and rural matters, including farming.  When it comes to knowledge of actual hunting, their heads are as empty as a eunuch’s underpants.  Allow me to explain.

The natural world has no rules – evolution shows that in the natural world things either survive long enough to reproduce or they don’t.  Animals and plants kill each other all day long – there is no fairness or justice in nature.  Because nature is such a violent place, we humans, long ago, built notional caves to shelter inside, where we can nurture our kind and reproduce in safety.  We call our human caves “civilisation”.  Inside civilisation, we have rules called ethics and morals to share, exchange and prevent nature’s violence. In turn, those rules give us our human rights.

Outside, in nature, none of the other animals have any rules, so none have any rights. They are “things”, still violent and uncivilised, the very definition of nature.  

We haven’t any resources inside our human caves, so we send people outside to compete in nature for all the things we want or need. They are our primary industries and outside, in nature, they become predators – they kill things, chop things down, fig things up and take land for farming and building – all to supply human civilisation.  Then they bring stuff back to the cave where the secondary and tertiary industries inside, acting ethically and morally, turn those resources into useful stuff and nurture us with them.

If the primary industries do their thing well outside, lots of resources flow into our human caves. Our living standards then go up and our caves, in effect, grow larger. The people then move deeper into their caves to enjoy the nurture – that’s the point of having human civilisation.  After long periods of peace and plenty, the civilians inside the cave completely lose sight of the outside – comfy and deep inside the cave, they never see a soldier and all their food, including the fruit and vegetables, comes from supermarkets, nicely wrapped with all the blood washed off. By this stage, the civilians are institutionalised – they are completely civilised and cannot even imagine the unrestricted competition and violence of the natural world.  Nobody tells them what is going on outside, or how all of their animal, vegetable and mineral resources are brought into ownership for the cave.

Even when they do go outside, civilians look with civilian eyes and see only a green and pleasant land, where all the animals are “persons” rather than “things”, all have names and all live in harmony with each other, tra-la-la.  Civilians are then concerned that the nasty, hairy-arsed outside primary industries, including farmers, are vandals, destroying the harmonious, civilian fairy-dust and unicorn mirage of their dream. They have no idea that civilisation’s own greedy living standards and wants – they themselves – are the drivers of the primary industries outside. Nobody teaches this stuff in school anymore – they are all too busy destroying the nation’s common sense with far more important matters like women-have-penises and how to address a singular person as “they”.

Can you imagine what the effect would be if you told a modern civilian snowflake that, in the UK, we cull 350,000 deer annually just to protect their food crops and we shoot 100,000 primarily for meat? What about the 20,000 deer trophies that foreign hunters take home?  What cruel bastard will tell civilians how the lovely stag horn dog chews get into Pets at Home or how many of the UK’s 36 million wild rabbits get sent across the rainbow bridge annually? It is ironic that in the age of information, four fifths of the population can be completely eco-illiterate.

According to the survey, only 53% of UK civilians think farmers should even be allowed to hunt pests – 36% of them actually oppose farmers hunting pests. More than half oppose the hunting of deer under any circumstance – why not ask them what they would do with the UK’s 2 million deer that are well able to increase 25% annually unless managed. Where do these dim civilians think all their food comes from? 75% oppose the idea of landowners (who actually manage the land) being able to hunt anytime, anyhow on their own land. Are you surprised that halfwit urban sabs can turn up at any time on anyone’s farm for a bit of recreational vandalism and intimidation? What can you say to the 79% of Britons who oppose the hunting of foxes with dogs, yet manage to kill five times as many – 100,000 of them – under the wheels of their own cars every year?

YouGov should rather ask civilians something relevant to them – if they should be allowed to kill rats and cockroaches in their houses filled with stuff that wild animals died to provide. Why not ask civilians how many hundreds of thousands of animals died to supply the thousands of tons of materials and fuels that went into building the huge “sustainable, zero carbon” 20,000 seat Co-op stadium, just to hear some look-at-me-everyone celebrity idiot screaming for a couple of hours?  Those concert tickets are washed of blood, too.

It gets even dumber when it comes to foreign animals. 85% oppose the hunting of zebras, yet zebras are raised for hunting and the horse meat trade these days. 92% oppose the hunting of elephants, even though as many as 100,000 too many elephants are dangerous five-ton garden pests in some southern African countries – faced with a five ton garden slug in the UK, urbanites would change their tune sharpish. It is so easy to pontificate when you don’t have to stand up to your ankles in liquid politics in a lambing shed at 3 am on a February morning or watch helplessly as your own child is being stamped into a puddle of claret by a wonderful, majestic elephant.  

Despite the fact that we have been hunters for the whole of human history and hunting has always been the vitally important and honourable, perfectly normal supply side of human civilisation, modern UK civilians haven’t the faintest idea what hunting or wildlife management is and most of them have never ever even met a farmer, let alone a hunter. The only information they ever get is the penny dreadful propaganda put out by snake oil salesmen and charlatans skimming them for donations, because they are unprotected by equally ignorant “advertising and fundraising standards” that are about as much use as asking Gary Glitter to guard a girls’ high school.

Of course you Squires are all pre-occupied with the dismal fact that farmers will get more vinegar and bile than milk of human kindness from the bosom of Rachel “Rosa Krebs” Reeves, but realise for a moment that YouGov asking these lovely, naive, civilised UK cave dwellers what they think about hunting is just about as useful as asking Dianne Abbott MP to explain Quantum Mechanics.  The real horror is that Kim Jong Starmer will use these ridiculous survey figures to set policy.

Last one out of the British countryside, take a photo to show the kids what they lost, and please close the gate.

John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.