Nature Notes - Cull-ture club and coughing cows

Ruddy ducks, bloody deer and bastard badgers are just three species to have the misfortune to find themselves on the front pages of the newspapers next to the word ‘cull’.

It’s hard to think of another creature as inoffensive as a duck, unless you are a loaf of bread in which case you probable have a lot to fear.  Only my nephew can challenge a duck when it comes to a complete lack of guile.  This is a child that was once outwitted by a goat, a tale still referred to round the dinner table by the title ‘Billy and the trousers’.  Deer, it would seem are a victim of their own success, they breed in numbers and rub their antlers on trees.  Well, obviously, something has to be done about this rutting arboreal menace.

The problem for badgers is not that traditional shaving brushes have suddenly become very fashionable but rather that they give cattle bovine TB.  Whether they sneak up behind an unsuspecting cow in dead of night with a syringe full of the stuff, or whether they just cough on them has not been made clear.  What has been made clear is that cows make milk and therefore money while badgers make beloved characters in childrens’ literature but this is not enough to prevent them from the sort of persecution until recently reserved for kiddyfiddlers, 1970s teevee personalities or, worst of all, kiddyfiddling 1970s teevee personalities, the cull of which has also been front page news.

 If coughing cows is not reason enough to dislike them, Nazis obviously had badger sympathies, as is evidenced by their sharing of the same colour scheme.  All footage of Nazis shows them in black and white.

Culling is a traditional country pastime and one imagines that rather than Predator Drone strikes, traditional country cruelty will be employed.

The Field

Right!  This is it!  I’m serious this time.  I am absolutely not going to buy any more new books until I have read the ones I have bought but not read yet.  

That includes the ones that I purchased because I was going to read them on holiday.  In 2011.  Not only do I have a variety of books lying unopened and unread that I am looking forward to reading, I have also received books for Christmas from generous family.  I need to institute a strict reading programme and not get distracted by going into bookshops, coming over a bit giddy at the smell of the print, and exiting with an armful of new paperbacks.  Nor will I get pissed and go on Amazon.  These are distractions.

But that doesn’t apply to buying magazines, does it? 

No? 

Great!

That’s why it was quite legitimate to buy a copy of ‘The Field’.

‘The Field’ is an absolutely astonishing magazine.  It is all about hunting, shooting and fishing but, and this is the astonishing bit, it is unironic and unapologetic in its coverage of these matters.

I’ve long believed that because of a combination of desktop publishing and the cheap costs of printing, there is pretty much a magazine about every subject. 

Back in the day, there used to be things called ‘fanzines’, small circulation magazines produced by enthusiasts about various subjects (most famously music but also genre literature) printed on hand-operated presses using chemicals that, if used today, would get you onto some sort of watch list and, as I recall, used to result in an experience that made reading a fanzine one step away from glue sniffing. 

The advent of the internet allowed many people to move their interests on-line while the advent of computer composition for magazines enabled there to be more than one magazine published about, for instance, quilting, when one might reasonably assume that the natural number of magazines about quilting required in the world is one.  If that.

Depending on the social circle you move in, hunting shooting and fishing are either cruel, a bloody good weekend, or an excuse to wear a lot of tweed and drive a 4x4.  ‘The Field’ is for people who like their lives uncomplicated by moral choices about killing things.  This is because the people who read ‘The Field’ probably live in the country, and realise that in the county, things are red in tooth and claw to say the least and everything is out to get you.  When faced with an angry badger, shoot first, or the little bastard will savage you long before he manages to cough on you, infecting you with bovine TB and condemning you to life as a poet.

It is a little odd to read tales of slaughter told with such relish, and yet somehow attractive too.  It might be something of an exaggeration to describe a brisk bout with a trout as a ‘battle’, but it does readily convey the image of three hours in the blazing sunshine flogging yourself up and down a river with several pounds of angry fish on the other end of the line and nothing but upper body strength and, if all else fails, something your mate brought back from Afgan for you to fall back on, but it paints a picture.

My favourite article, even better than the pictures of naked posh birds taken from the type of charity calendars that young farmers like to crack one out to, is the reviews of the guns.  Guns are reviewed in ‘The Field’ the same way that cars are reviewed in other magazines, and cost about the same.

Reading about something written by an enthusiast is always a joy, and there’s a neat counterpoint when it’s written by people who think (rightly) that their way of life is under threat and yet shows, at the same time, that huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ are as alive and well today as they always have been, at least between the pages of the magazine.  One gets the feeling that people who own guns are rarely ambivalent in their opinion.  When you’re facing down a charging boar, it’s deeds, not thoughts, that count.