Don't ask, don't get

It can seem impossible to get permission to shoot over a farm but sometimes you just need to ask the right things.

- Simon Garnham

Shooting Times is full of excellent articles offering advice on all manner of shooting-related skills: fieldcraft, training gundogs, accurate shooting and preparing game to name but a few. However, before any of those things can take place, a keen young Gun needs somewhere to go. This can be the most difficult part of the whole process.

Persuading a landowner to allow you access to their valuable business with a firearm can make decoying wary woodies or achieving blind retrieves over water look like child’s play. In 1987 I was bitten by the music bug. I bought an album by The Housemartins — a good name for a band, I thought, and the music was OK too.

One of the tracks on the album was called “Me and the Farmer” and the final verse ran: “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small. All we’ve got is London Zoo ’cos farmer owns them all.” The chorus ran: “Won’t he let you? Probably no. Why does he treat you so? I just don’t know.”

I’ve found myself humming those words on a number of occasions over the years. It’s my consolation song when refused permission to shoot somewhere — something that has occurred all too frequently in the 33 intervening years and occasionally still does. Farmers can be tricky.

Nirvana