Strictly Come Shooting

Game shooting is becoming more popular, which means it must be seen to police itself ever more stringently, says the CA’s Liam Stokes

Game shooting has entered a new and exciting modern era. There has been a lot of talk of late of the challenges these developments present, but not enough of the solutions we need. Negotiating this modern era will require modern structures, the building of which will need some radical thinking.

The number of people involved in game shooting has never been higher. There are more paying Guns, more shoot days being offered and more people going beating and picking-up. This, of course, means a larger area of land under game management, more birds being released, more game being shot and more game meat available for cooking and eating.

There can be no doubt that this presents some challenges, particularly to a community that is rightly proud of its traditions. As game shooters we strive to be conservationists, and the desire to conserve goes hand in hand with (small-c) conservatism.

We must not allow our conservatism to morph into a wish that game shooting were not growing. We can’t confidently trumpet the benefits of shooting while also wishing that there was less of it. More game shooting means more jobs, more money for conservation and more investment for local rural communities.

The growth of shooting is closely associated with a rise in commercialism. People get very prickly around the term “shooting industry” or “commercial shooting”, yet we proudly broadcast the £2billion annual contribution we make to the UK economy. Farming friends of mine are fond of saying “if you don’t have a profit you don’t have a farm”. All the public goods that flow from farming can only be considered in that context, and the same is increasingly true of shooting.