A pheasant graveyard
The war between peasants and pheasants continues.
Some people from Totnes, in Devon, went out for a picnic in the woods.
[T]he Duke of Somerset owns much of the area’s woodlands, and they remain largely off-limits to the public because they are used for a large pheasant shoot.
The Duke owns 2,800 acres of land in some of the most beautiful areas of Devon, but the vast majority of it is inaccessible to the public. This is despite the fact he has received funds for the woodland the protesters picnicked in under the English Woodland Grant Scheme, which comes from taxpayer money.
Yes but owning huge tracts of land is what being a duke is all about. Nobody gonna make you a duke if all you own is a little semi with a garden.
This walk in the woods was illegal because there is no right to roam in England’s countryside. In Scotland, visitors have a right to visit green spaces, and it is agreed they should pass through respectfully and not leave a mess.
…
Those on the protest made a point of picking up litter in the woods, which are used chiefly for pheasant breeding and shooting. Plastic cartridges and piles of pheasant feathers littered the floor, and in a valley visible from the field the protesters picnicked, there was a “pheasant graveyard”, with at least 100 bird carcasses dumped alongside an old washing machine and a pile of wire fence.
Carcasses! Dumped?! That bit surprised me. I thought they ate them. It seems the dukes and dukelings raise them to be killed for the sheer fun of it. I find that disgusting.
Large swathes of private woodlands remain out of bounds to walkers, with estate owners using them instead for releasing and shooting pheasants, a non-native species of game bird. An estimated 50 million pheasants are released into the British countryside every year – equivalent in weight to the total biomass of wild birds in Britain.
All just for target practice. It’s breathtakingly stupid.
“Pheasant graveyard” reminds me that a mall in New Hampshire near where I used to work is called Pheasant Lane Mall, but was referred to by many of my friends as Dead Pheasant Mall. I don’t know the origin of either the correct name or the nickname.
Pheasant is phood. The description of the scene sounds suspiciously like things I’ve (personally) seen happen when employees decide to cut corners. Not saying that’s what this is, just what it feels like.
Breathtakingly stupid and extraordinarily inhumane. Why people teach their children that life is insignificant boggles the mind. There were wild ringneck pheasant where I grew up, they are beautiful creatures. Not native to northern California either, introduced in the 1800’s for probably the same reason, a game bird. I never hunted, but there was a buzz around when it became ‘pheasant season.’ I ran across them often, out walking the dog or riding my trail bike. They are harmless and have no detrimental impact to the environment that I know of. The people I knew who hunted them also ate them, so at least they didn’t go to waste, but I couldn’t bring myself to go out and shoot them out of the sky when the grocery store had plenty of perfectly edible food that didn’t involve slaughtering harmless creatures. If these bluebloods are just killing them to satisfy their bloodlust, then I think there’s something seriously morally wrong with them. Inhumane and dishonorable both. People like that can just go stright to hell for all I care, I just wish there was such a thing.
We had pheasants where I grew up too. We had to post our fields (2 small ones) in autumn, and I had to wear a red jacket or sweater when playing outside. Even with the posting my mother sometimes had to go out there and tell hunters to gtfo.
A pheasant hunt and poaching is the plot of “Danny, the Champion of the World” by Roald Dahl, I read it several times as a child.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny,_the_Champion_of_the_World
I didn’t realize pheasants weren’t native to the US. I had a relative who was a pheasant hunter who also periodically bred pheasants and released them into the wild to help get their population numbers up. I always thought it was nice that although he hunted them he was also into conservation of them. Kind of puts it in a different light to find it is a non-native species only being stocked up to be hunted since there’s no conservation aspect for a non-native species.
As for hunting in general, I am a mostly vegan vegetarian, but I’m fine with hunting as long as people make good use of what they hunt. My mom, who ate meat regularly, thought hunting was disgusting and people doing it were bloodthirsty creeps. I personally more thought people who eat meat should probably kill a few of the animals they eat occasionally so they’re not so disconnected from the process. And most game animals probably have better lives than factory-farmed ones anyway.
Oh, yeah, and don’t get me started on “catch and release” fishing. WTF is that? Poke some holes in a fish’s mouth, haul it out of water so it can suffocate for a minute or two while you take pictures, then toss it back in. Why?
Supposedly more of these fish than people realize don’t survive the experience (their mouth is damaged, they’re triggering predators by bleeding, they’re in shock from being out of the water). But even if there is no truth to that, what is the point? If people want/need to catch fish to eat, fine, but why torture them?
I imagine it’s not uncommon for housing developments (or shopping malls) to be named for the natural features which were cut down and plowed under when they were built. Maybe the same thing happens in NewHampshire.
Totnes is a town I know very well (when I owned property in the UK (until 2018, when it was sold) it was in Totnes) and my parents lived there for years, until my father died, and, much later, my mother went into a nursing home. Nonetheless, I had some difficulty from the report figuring out exactly where the protest was taking place. That wasn’t at all clear from the Guardian, but eventually I learned from the Times that it was close to Berry Pomeroy castle — not exactly Totnes, but reasonably close — within walking distance if you’re in better shape than I am.
Anyway, it is scandalous that in 2021 a duke can take tax payers’ money to keep tax payers off “his” land.
My sister went to a boarding school on another part of the Duke of Somerset’s estate — in her day it was a girls’ school, but now it takes boys as well.
In my mis-spent youth, when I was working on a huge arable farm in Bedfordshire, there was a pheasant shoot and some of the labourers, including myself, were ordered to be beaters. A crowd of wealthy nobs arrived, nattily dressed & equipped for the fun, each with his loader, formed up in a line and we, bearing sticks with which to beat the bushes, moved towards them, beating away. Shot was rattling in the trees above us, and I began to wonder whether, once in a while, a few peasants get shot along with the pheasants. When one wood was bereft of its pheasants we had to get the backs of small covered trucks together with a few of the nobs (we got in last) and set off to beat another soon to be bereaved wood. One of the owners of the farm was in the truck I was in, and he made a joke about one of the nobs (not on our truck) being a poor shot and missing his birds. I gave a quiet snigger, and was given a furious look by the owner for not knowing my place.
There is also grouse-shooting, which attracts even wealthier nobs, and means that large areas in the Highlands, northern England & Wales are bereft of trees, and are also illegally in most cases bereft of raptors, like hen harriers and eagles, often by poisoning.
Jeeezus.
“Highlands, northern England & Wales are bereft of trees,”
I discussion of “Rewilding” I have seen mention that deer in such places eat the saplings, thus preventing the forest in such areas from re-growing. My understanding is that it was sheep raising that originally eliminated the forest, but now landowners like to have lots of deer for easy hunting. So they don’t hunt them enough to allow forest to regrow. Reintroducing wolves would likely keep the deer numbers low enough for trees to re-grow.
#12 Yes, there is some talk of ‘rewilding’, and deer (and sheep) do eat saplings, but the main problem with the grouse moors is that the old-growth heather is burnt off so that new, tender heather shoots, which the grouse feed on, spring up; this allows the grouse population to be kept high for shooting, and at the same time damages peat soils and causes other problems.
I should have added that burning the old heather also kills any young trees that my be growing.