BY SARAH GREENWOOD
On Saturday night my friend rang me to tell me that he’d had to go and shoot a sheep. Nothing wrong with that you might think, except for how he felt about doing it.
My friend is a pest controller, so no stranger to pointing a gun at a target and pulling the trigger. But killing a creature out in its own surroundings, when it has no idea that a quick end is coming – and even if it was aware that, potentially, its impending demise was imminent – it still has the ability to evade its hunter by its own natural predator-evading skills.
Sadly, this wasn’t the case. My friend had been called in to shoot an old ewe, who had gone off her feet. In this day and age having her shot was cheaper and quicker than getting a vet out to euthanise her by lethal injection, which would have drawn out the process to the detriment of the ewe.
The sheep on the farm where he was bound were used to seeing him walking about with his gun, and the noise it makes, so when he arrived Saturday evening they weren’t unduly perturbed. He pointed his 4.10 at the appropriate spot on her head, pulled the trigger and a split second later she had ascended to woolly heaven to gambol through the clouds for eternity with those many others who had gone before her.
Yet she left my friend feeling awful.
It was, as he described it, ‘the nearest he’d got to ‘canned hunting’ as he was ever likely to’, and even though he knew it was for the best in all ways it was not something he enjoyed doing.
This is not what the Animal Rights mob would have the public believe.
According to them gun wielding ‘toffs’ roam the countryside looking for things to shoot – anything – and enjoy doing it to satisfy their ‘psychopathic bloodlust’.
The Truth is so different.
Shooting and hunting people kill, but not for ‘bloodlust’. They kill for food, they kill for the betterment of creatures in pain, and they kill pests. There is a reason why animals get killed in the countryside.
Nobody harasses council pest control services or accuses them of ‘bloodlust’ when attending to the millions of rats and mice etc attracted by the detritus of modern living. Rodent controllers are not pestered by balaclava-wearing thugs who shriek about them being ‘toffs’ who indulge their base instincts by poisoning creatures to death. Neither are vets harangued by the same AR mobs for putting beloved pets out of their misery by lethal injection.
I know vets haunted in the same way as my friend by having to put down dogs and cats and horses but the AR mobs don’t even whisper anything negative about this because if they did their supporters would melt away, because pets are ‘mainstream’ not minority and everyone knows about dogs and cats but most people don’t know about managing pests and livestock in the countryside so it’s easy to pull the wool over the eyes of the general public.
To the animal rights activists:
The next time you, the cat-owning animal rights activist, chide your moggie for bringing a dead creature into your home, think of my friend. Then consider the utter hypocrisy of your position, a regressive appeal to heart not head.
Sarah Greenwood has farmed in Yorkshire all her life, has a general interest in fieldsports, but particularly in hunting. She runs Phoenix Aid working in Bosnia and Kosovo.