|
Poaching is kind of frowned upon...but it depends what and where you're poaching. People get rightly annoyed at those whopoach the deer in thge valley nearby, because we have such low deer numbers. They reckon we have fewer than ten deer out there now. I don't think people are so upset at the idea of someone off lamping hares with their lurchers.
It's dying out now, as an art. But it used to be a class thing. Pretty much all land was owned after the enclosures of the 18th century, so even into the 20th century there was a sense of poaching as the poor man's game. A working-class thing. The wealthy hunted foxes and 'game' animals. The labouring classes in the countryside would risk severe punishment to hunt food. Then it became more of a sport, a kind of keeping alive of an older culture. Reawakened during the war years once rationing was introduced.
These days, it sems to fall into two brackets. There are those who are keeping alive the old ways. And there are those who like to play with big guns and hunt bigger game. The latter seem to take their cue from you guys. But they don't take into account the fact that you have huge amounts of free roaming deer, whilst ours are endangered. As I say; we're down to a family of about 6 deer in the valley now. If that. There are more on the big landed estates, where stocks are deliberately kept up for the purposes of hunting, but they're quite a rarity in most of England.
|