A great way to beef up a shoot
Look back through old copies of Shooting Times and you’ll find a great deal of farming material woven into the blend. There are many stories of hares and rabbits shot from a combine harvester or terriers catching rats in the stackyard; scruffy adventures that always harked back to an agricultural calendar.
The connection between farming and fieldsports is still present today, but it’s become harder to see as the two worlds have slowly drifted apart. Farming has intensified over the past 50 years, and many of the changes have driven a decline of wild game. We now associate several quarry species with tales of scarcity and decline, so it’s hard to believe that birds such as grey partridges were ever produced almost by accident. However, a shootable surplus came as a by-product of traditional farm management, and that seems crazy when you think how much work goes into conserving wild gamebirds today.
