CharlieT

I am minded to believe it was cut and pasted from the Morning Star.

Looks like you are gradually ticking off all the hurdles. Just to confirm, I'm happy to help, so if you need it, just message me on here and we will sort it.

Welcome to the forum. As has been said, have a chat with your FEO and find out from the horses mouth what you can actually do. I don't know where in Somerset you are but I live on Exmoor, just over the Somerset border in Devon. If you are not too far from me, I would be more than willing to act as your honorary uncle and buy and gift you a shotgun.

Exactly. There is nothing to match the exhilaration of following hounds on foot or a half decent horse. I've ridden to stag, fox and followed hare hounds on foot all my life. I would gladly swing for Blair for selling us down the river for political expediency. The greatest sport invented.

You're as bad as an anti, just hiding behind emotive words. Come on, put your money where your mouth is and quote a number.

Just out of interest, what would you consider the maximum number of birds that would be acceptable for an individual gun to shoot during the course of a full day's shooting.

Well, I can't speak of the manners of people in your neck of the woods, but in my 70 odd years of farming, never once has any one of the multiple hunts we have in this area not phoned or come in person to ask me if it's OK for them to pass across our land whilst hunting the following day.

I see the same old class twaddle is being bandied about by posters with a chip on their shoulder. If its not posh fox hunters galloping over the countryside, its posh shooters in tweed frowning on semi autos or those with too much money buying large game shooting days...................

I thought you'd appreciate it

A bit like game shooting then.

It's going to be hard going on such a small parcel of land. All you could do is, as the previous poster said, is to site your pen in the central cover plot and fly them to the other, with the guns standing towards the middle of the field. That would make most use of the trees to give the birds some height and cover to aim for. Only feed the birds in the plots. I would be tempted to put a pen and feeders in each plot so that they could be flown both ways, giving a drive in the morning and another in the afternoon.

I think down in the short term, then rallying to best current prices once markets and the ability to kill sufficient are established. I think Hogget comes down to Jo public's taste. The modern young housewife, if I'm allowed to use that expression these days, prefers a less strong tastes.

It is perhaps not as gloomy as I paint. France as an example, import New Zealand lamb in reasonable quantities, so there is a market and bearing in mind shipping from NZ takes some 6 weeks we have that in our favor. I hope and believe, that given time the EU market will accept and become accustomed to buying chilled lamb carcases from us rather than live. It would certainly create employment in the UK and with investment in slaughtering here is something that I feel will happen, it will just take time to kick it into gear. It would also go some way towards evening out price fluctuations caused by slaughterhouse capacity. I see UK meat exports to the EU crashing in the New Year until the logistics of export sort themselves out and with that in mind, I have been selling lambs furiously for the past month + so as not to get caught out.

The lamb market for one relies on exports to countries such as France and to a lesser degree Gremany, a market that wants live, not frozen/chilled lamb. And yes, you are right, UK slaughter houses would not be able to cope with the numbers. The price fluctuates weekly and in many cases daily for home consumption due to the processing capability of UK slaughter and cutting houses. I don't know how many UK lambs end up in Africa or the Middle East but The EU say 10% of total EU lamb production is exported there, with, by far, the greater number going to the Middle East. One thing to remember is that with a lamb costing say £100 at a UK market and loosing weight and therefore money on a daily basis if not fed and watered properly, it makes uneconomic sense for UK exported live lambs to be treated with anything but the best welfare standards.

And if farmers can't make a living and are forced to get out who do you think will eventually end up owning the land and welcome shooters. Certainly it won't be the eco friendly woke brigade, who will eventually turn our country into some vast nature reserve with a certain Mr Packham as it's president and Kerry ten Kate, Ben Goldsmith and Carrie Symonds as council members...............meanwhile we will all be forced to pay substancially more for our food, all of which will all have to be imported in a most carbon unfriendly way from countries with far from ideal animal welfare standards. But hey ho, at least we can sleep easy in the knowledge that our rewilded countryside is full of beaver, lynx, bison and wolves.

The same place it comes from when you collect it from the chemist.

yes.

I've had a whisper on my hornet for a few years and it's been first class.

I would rather miss out on this one and have another 5 to look forward to rather than the high risk that this would likly be my last.

Which is why, I guess, it still exists.

It's just been reported on in our TV national news. A tragic day for democracy and law and order.

I can't remember anyone in the village ever buying an old post office gun license or ever been asked to show one, but I do remember when those white ones came in. Our village Bobby used to always do his licensing rounds on a Sunday morning around breakfast time and never once refused a fry up. Dear old chap, he was a reliable source of local info and could always be relied upon to tell us village lads where he'd seen an old fox skulking around when doing his early morning rounds. When a couple of the Estate keepers caught a couple of us poaching and took us to the police house he spent ages trying to talk them out of insisting we were prosecuted, regrettably he failed and we were summoned to court and fined. Interestingly, neither our Bobby nor the court asked to see our gun or game license.

Exactly.

In the circumstances you describe, I have always submitted a variation with a request that my current rifle be put on a temporary permit. This enables me to continue to use my rifle until the variation comes through and then buy the new one. Then, with the old rifle on the temp permit, it allows sufficient time to dispose of the unwanted rifle in whichever way I chose.

Tragic news. Always came across as a nice chap, he will be missed.