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

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Last month, at lunch, my sister’s marathon-running boyfriend told me a story about a dead pig falling out the back of a van on a rainy day. He’d been walking through Smithfield Market at the time, heading off to do whatever it is he does, when a large bloke opened the rear door of his wagon and the big flaccid animal flopped into a puddle.

“It was actually quite disgusting,”he reported, pushing his glasses up his nose. The consumption of animals and the process through which they end up on our plates is not all roses.

The consumption of animals and the process through which they end up on our plates is not all roses

The marathon-running boyfriend’s pig story came back to me the other day when I was standing beneath a beech tree in Norfolk looking across at a wounded pigeon at the bottom of a sprawl of pines.

The conditions for “roost shooting”, as it’s known, were perfect. When the wind blows, the birds that are returning from feeding — in this case on a local farmer’s kale crop — just want to get into the shelter of the trees as quickly as possible, so they abandon much of their usual caution and tend to present some easy shots.

The bird, flapping around at the bottom of the pine, evidently hadn’t been that easy though and my shot, in spite of knocking a fair few feathers out of it, hadn’t connected with anything vital. I put my gun down, walked over to the bird, and wrung its neck.

It’s easy when you know how and I placed it carefully next to the four or so others and then stood, at the ready again, looking up at the gap where they’d been cutting through the wind and whiffling into the branches.

Like that pig, the pigeons were destined for the table and a couple of evenings later, after marinating the birds in red vermouth and lime, I fried them just a bit, sliced them up, and served them on crackers with celeriac purée. “It’s really good,” a young Marxist who was back home for Christmas from New York said, with crumbs all down his polo-neck.

I wondered what everybody at the party would have thought about those injured pigeons and their crunching end

“Really good woodpigeon,”a civil servant friend (currently on sabbatical to do a Masters) agreed. He has flirted with vegetarianism, at least in conversation anyway, most often when he’s fl irting with vegetarian girls, but I’ve never actually known him say no to game.

As we ate and drank and smoked, I wondered what everybody at the party would have thought about those injured pigeons and their crunching end. In the past, I’ve told people that the whole shooting thing is really very quick and humane — the shot is fired and the bird crumples lifeless to the ground to start its journey to our plates, a sort of happy pastoral sacrifice. But that’s not always true. It doesn’t mean hunting is wrong, but we should acknowledge the reality of it.

Between Christmas and New Year, I read a piece in the Guardian by the great poet Benjamin Zephaniah about what he was going to do differently in 2023. He planned, he wrote, to stop telling people that he doesn’t eat meat and instead tell them that he doesn’t “eat animals”. He’s been vegan since he was 13 and for all that time, he reckons he’s been living euphemistically in order not to offend. I wondered as I read the piece if I have also, in a sense, told people that the whole hunting thing is totally humane out of politeness, in order to make them feel better about the pheasant in their jalfrezi.

To ignore how we really engage with animals lessens them in some way and lessens us too

I suspect I too would have winced at the sight of that pig falling into the gutter with death in its little black eyes but there’s a funny sort of hypocritical truth in us wincing. When the doors of that wagon fell open, my sister’s boyfriend was confronted with what eating meat really means. Perhaps in 2023, I’ll stop bullshitting. “Five of the pigeons hit the ground dead but two didn’t” — I should have said — “and I had to wring their necks. Then after the sun went down, I sat by a small pond and listened to ducks circling above me before flying down onto the water to shelter for the night. And as I watched them, silhouetted, gliding in the half-dark, I plucked the pigeons, letting their soft white feathers drift away on the breeze.”

The bloody and the raw is part of the richness of rural Britain and I think Zephaniah is right. To ignore how we really engage with animals lessens them in some way and lessens us too.