This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Last week something happened that wasn’t very Christmassy. I was staring at the damp patch on the wall of my study, watching it get bigger and bigger as the rain came down when an email landed from a musician I’d had a meeting with the previous day. 

Wildfowling is about much more than pulling the trigger

She loved the idea, she said, of the project we’d been discussing but she’d been doing a bit of digging and had discovered that I edit a website called Shooting UK. She wasn’t totally right. Shooting UK is edited by a nice lady called Charlotte but admittedly, they do run the odd recipe from Shooting Times and our reviews too, from time to time, of things like those new deer stalking trousers: the windproof, waterproof, breathable ones you’re all talking about. The email hurt — she’d seen what I was about, it essentially said, and what I stand for and she couldn’t align her “values and standards” with mine. In short, she was out. 

It’s important these days, in the creative sphere, for everyone to be vocal about their values and standards because I guess if they aren’t, it’s tricky to know exactly who it is that you’re meant to dislike. I’m not always entirely sure what my values are but it’s not the first time they’ve got me into trouble. 

I was struck that the haughty tone of the message was uncannily similar to emails I’ve received over the years from the big beasts of the shooting world. Not so long ago, the editor of a well-known fieldsports magazine emailed, copying in my publisher, to suggest I’m really far too vocal about criticising some of the excesses of game shooting, things such as raptor persecution and more birds being shot than people are ever going to consume. Surely I recognise, he asked, that I’m putting advertising revenue at risk. 

A couple of weeks before the musician emailed, I was sitting in a gutter on the Isle of Lewis, drinking black coffee, sucking on a damp cigarette, and listening to redshank crying in the salty blackness. The greylags wouldn’t be moving off their roost for the best part of an hour but wildfowling is about much more than pulling the trigger. 

I’ll always remember being invited to read the quiz at the Devon Wildfowlers’ Association summer barbecue (a real perk of the job). As I spoke to club members about the season past, I was reminded of that William Wordsworth poem, “The Ruined Cottage”, in which he writes of a herdsman that “in the mountains did he feel his faith”. The true wildfowler finds theirs on the mud at dawn. 

That email hurt because I felt it suggested I don’t care

When you climb into a sandy hole and duck out of sight, everything can carry on around you, as though you don’t exist. When you can look but the world doesn’t know you’re looking, it’s as though you’ve seen a secret. Part of the wonder of wildfowling is that you never really know what’s going to happen but there is also a reassuring order to it. The redshank, that sentinel of the sand, cries out as light begins to seep in. Later the gulls drift over, and then when you can just about begin to see, ducks fly low along the water’s edge. Eventually, when day breaks, the geese will lift. 

Currently, they’re stringing turkeys up by their feet and slashing their throats. Eleven million of them are killed in Britain each year. They stun them first by dipping their heads in a tank of water with an electric current running through it and then they’re rotated round, upside down beneath a conveyor belt, so their necks can be run across a spinning blade. 

Low over the sea in front of me, the dark outline of a dozen or so greylags appeared, flying hard into the wind. I’m not sure if it’s true but I’ve always thought that birds can feel the human eye on their backs, so I hunkered down, listening to them get closer and closer, with my face just above the sand. 

When you’re shooting geese, standards matter — they’re big birds and a couple of pellets in the chest won’t bring them down. “Hit them in the head,” an old fowler said to me once, on the sea wall by Portsmouth Harbour, “and the rest of the bird dies too.” The first greylag crumpled at my feet and the second, a longer crossing shot, flew on for forty yards and then tumbled dead into the gorse behind. 

There is very little fat on a wild greylag and one of the birds I shot was old so I’ll do them in the slow cooker this Christmas, with cider and apples, and as I eat them I’ll sit there in my paper hat, remembering the red shank, and the curlew, and the sense of wonder I felt when I looked up and saw those geese above me in the grey cold. 

Meat is meat, a vegan friend of mine told me recently or, as Morrissey put it, meat is murder. But I’ve never seen it like that, and certainly not as I sat there in that sandy hole, running my fingers over the charcoal wing feathers and the mottled grey bellies of those of birds. Wildfowling is hunting but it’s hunting as it should be. It’s goose worship, almost a strange sort of paganism that sets you on a better tack in a world disconnected from nature. 

That email hurt because I felt it suggested I don’t care. It suggested that I am part of the problem, and it hurt even more because if I believe in anything, it’s that protecting the beauty of the natural world is only possible if people work together and try to understand. Gamekeepers should listen to activists who want greater access to private land, conservationists need to speak to farmers, and musicians creating music that celebrates nature, should try to respect hunting as something bound up, in a complicated way, with a profound love of wild places.

On my way back across the island, I stopped in at the petrol station. “Shooting geese,” the old boy behind me in the queue asked. “A couple,” I replied. He stood there shaking his head. “Hellish nuisance on the airfield and they’ve had most of my grass. I’d shoot the lot of them if I was a younger man.” 

I smiled and paid for my rolls. I suppose our values won’t ever really all align and that’s probably a good thing. It would be the end of culture if they did. I like people and I don’t like it much when they make it clear they don’t like me but even if it means that Hoxton musicians and Home Counties grandees won’t have me at their table, I’ll carry on writing about shooting’s excesses, as well as worshipping geese in that strange way.