Oh, the hypocrisy of it, the double-think; deploring the excesses of shooters, as celebrated in sporting magazines, but guzzling with delight the snipe or mallard that kind friends send you. Snipe, rolled in bacon and roasted on thick slices of bread as recently consumed - well, welcome autumn and winter bang-bangs.
On Monday the woodcock season opens, and curlew may be shot for the month of November. Remembering the night-cry of curlews as they descended from the hills to feed on the mudflats at the harbour, how could one eat them? And never will. Never mind logic. Now the English magazine The Field has gone to town in its current issue with a big headline on the cover. "The Best Game Shots of All Time". Pages and pages inside with illustrations of the good and the rich, toting guns. There is even a page of the "Best Lady Guns" and one shoot which is confined to females under the patronage of Lady Studd. They get bags of from 250 to 350.
In a chapter "Blasts from the Past", a few Irish notes are included. Thus, Sir Victor Brooke, Bt: "A globe-trotting all-round sportsman who founded the Pau foxhounds to amuse exiled Britons wintering in southern France. Sir Victor was notable as a brilliant and entirely ambidexterous shot. On his property at Colebrook, County Fermanagh in 1885 he shot 740 rabbits with 1,000 cartridges by his own gun, shooting off his right shoulder in the morning and his left after luncheon." (Rabbits, for God's sake. Boys with airguns, you'd imagine, would be at that.) Top of all shooters, it seems to be agreed, and you'll have read this before, was the Marquess of Ripon, formerly Lord de Grey. For his total lifetime's bag of game amounted to over half a million - 556,813 to be exact, and almost half of those, The Field notes, were pheasants. "While shooting at Dallowgill in Yorkshire on September 22 1923, aged 71, he bagged 51 grouse and a snipe in one drive before falling dead in the heather."
In an item on the Hon Mrs McCalmont (no date given) she is described as being swathed in a fur stole and a full-length tweed skirt, combining "late-Victorian dress with an untypical dedication to shooting and a keen competitiveness in an overwhelmingly male-dominated sport. Her occasional ladies-only shoots at Mount Juliet in Kilkenny blithely defied the Queen's condemnatory remark that "only fast women shoot." Who, you would wonder, ate all those corpses. The 700 rabbits, for example.