Why shooting should stay in the shadows

Daily Mail journalist Guy Adams argues that the best publicity for fieldsports is almost no publicity at all — with only two exceptions

- Guy Adams

Many who work in the media industry regularly go shooting

There is a concept very much in fashion in Westminster, where I occasionally work as a journalist, known as the “dead cat strategy”.

It works something like this: let’s suppose you’re at a dinner party, debating a topic in which the facts are almost entirely against you. Logic dictates that the longer this conversation continues, the more certain you are to lose the argument. So instead of continuing to talk, you decide to suddenly plonk a dead cat on to the dining table.

Now all anyone is saying is: “Crikey, that’s a dead cat!”

In other words, people have stopped thinking about the subject that was giving you so much grief and are instead obsessed with something new: a dead cat. They might very well be alarmed, disgusted and even traumatised at this development, but you have successfully ended a debate that you were otherwise bound to lose.

Dead cat strategies are simple, but can be highly effective. Perhaps the most famous, in recent years, involved the red bus that Boris Johnson unveiled during the 2016 Brexit referendum. It claimed that the UK sends £350million a week to the EU that could otherwise be spent on the NHS. The actual amount was nearer £180million. By using an inflated figure — which was guaranteed to be disputed — he created a distraction from other niggly debates. The nation instead spent weeks arguing about which gargantuan sum was actually sent to Brussels. For Boris, that worked out rather well.

Now opponents of shooting have also, in recent years, become very good at using dead cats — in some cases quite literally.