Fairness, first and foremost

We may look down on ‘unsophisticated’ American hunters, but they embraced respect for the quarry before we did, argues Sam Carlisle

- Sam Carlisle

Tom was showing a video to the group of people huddled around his phone screen. Someone in Texas, wearing a camouflage-print shirt and red bandana, was talking with an incomprehensible Southern twang about ‘huntin’ hogs’ and holding a military-looking rifle. The group laughed, either at the Texan’s unsophisticated zeal or his accent.

Whatever it was, it was a far cry from the scene around us: elevenses on a driven pheasant shoot, the crowd bedecked in tweed breeches and Schöffel coats, and all clutching a silver beaker of sloe gin. There can be a sense of superiority on the shooting fields of Britain; a sense that we shoot in the most sophisticated way, that ‘hunting’ really involves hounds and horses, and, particularly, that those Stateside are uncouth butchers who delight in killing.

From my forays into hunting in America, I can say that this is a baffling misconception. If anything, the notions of sportsmanship, fieldcraft and respect are taken more seriously by our friends across the Atlantic.

The key evolutions of shooting culture happened largely within the same decades of the late 19th century in both Britain and the US. As Walsingham, Ripon and PayneGallwey, helped by Edward VII, were refining the art of game shooting and shaping its culture here, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was creating the American hunting myth over there. Roosevelt was a great outdoorsman, fashioning a cultural ideal that revered and sought to conserve wilderness. He helped to found the national park system, which was embraced across the planet, and, crucially for America, enshrined easy access and public ownership of great tracts of land.