It’s been said that the United States and the United Kingdom are two nations separated by a common language.
Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in the area of hunting.
You see, the British barely hunt at all.
What you say? That’s not true!
Ah, well then, you must speak American rather than English.
You see, in the UK, “hunting” is defined as hunting with DOGS, and there’s not much of that anymore, if for no other reason than the Hunting Act of 2004 (effective Feb. 2005) banned most hunting with dogs.
What about fox hunting?
Fox hounds packs now operate (at least in theory) as drag or scent hound packs engaged in an artificial chase. Fox hunting over a pack of hounds is banned, and terrier work is confined to protecting game birds. Yes, terrier work is still legal, but it operates within a very narrow (and not very logical) band of permission.
What about bird hunting?
The British do not hunt birds, they SHOOT birds.
Is this a distinction with a difference?
Mostly, yes.
You see, most of the birds shot at the British “shoots” are potted chickens — pheasant and partridge hatched in incubators and grown out in netted enclosures, and then released in great densities a few months before “the “beaters” show up to drive them into the air to be blasted by “the guns.” They don’t talk about “hunting” birds in the UK, they talk about “the shoots.” For the most part this is not hunting — it’s shooting. Game in the bag is all but guaranteed — there’s no “hunting” it with the very real chance of coming home bag empty.
Are there exceptions? Of course. There is duck, geese, woodcock, grouse, and snipe hunting, but this is almost always done on private land with fee-per-person access. Public hunting lands paid for by dedicated taxes on guns and ammo, as we have here in the US? There’s none of that in the UK.
All of this is quite strange to American ears, where wild birds are hunted, where public hunting lands are everywhere, and where hounds (and sometimes terriers) are used on raccoon, bear, coyote, fox, and (in at least some states) deer.
And what about deer?
The British don’t hunt deer, they “stalk” deer.
Stalk?
You mean with a bow and arrow?
No, of course not. Bow hunting of all wild animals has been illegal in the UK since 1965.
While some Brits shoot deer from tree stands (called a “high seat” in the UK), most deer hunting is done on open ground with a rifle. One reason for this is the lay of the land. Tree cover in England is just 10 percent of the country, as compared to 62 percent in a state like Virginia.
What about rabbits and hares?
Coursing hares with dogs (aka “hunting” as the term is used in the UK) is entirely illegal, while shooting hares is entirely legal and without season or limit for the land owner or tenant, with the recent exception of Mountain Hares in Scotland.
Rabbits can be hunted with dogs and also with ferrets. They can also be long netted, purse-netted, snared, and shot without limit or season.
That said, two foreign diseases — myxomatosis and rabbit calicivirus, aka Rabbit Haemorrhagic Disease — have devastated British rabbit populations, reducing them by 60-80 percent, and hammering fox populations down stream as well.
What about other animals?
At the top end, there’s not much left. Bear, wolf, and lynx were extirpated from the UK hundreds of years ago.
While there are reported to be a few Scottish Wild Cats still about, they are no bigger than a large house cat.
There have never been coyotes, mountain lions, raccoons, or possums. There are no marmots or groundhogs.
What about badgers? They are in abundance, but entirely protected. If you are caught digging or shooting a badger, the law will be interested and things are not likely to end well.
Beaver and boar have been recently imported from mainland Europe, but both species are problematic in a countryside with too many farms and too few trees.
American gray squirrels have largely displaced native red squirrels, just as imported brown rats have almost entirely displaced native black rats. Both species are the subject of considerable “pest control,” as are wood pigeons, crows, and magpies which are both trapped and shot.
Is that it?
Not quite. You see there are seven species of deer in the UK, both foreign and native, and from small to large. The native Red Deer is what we we call an elk and, in fact, it will readily cross breed with American Elk, or wapiti.
But here too we have a bit of confusion, because what the Europeans call an Elk, we call a Moose. A Norwegian Elkhound does not hunt our Elk — it hunts their (and our) Moose.
Want more confusion? Read the visual summary highlighting the rules governing the Hunting Act in the UK at top. If you want to see what bastard child idiocy and ignorance might whelp if turned loose on wildlife management, the Hunting Act is the answer.
While fox cannot be chased with mounted hunts, and terriers can only be used to protect potted birds for shoots, shooting fox over bait is fine, as is the use of snares. Leghold traps (or what the British call “gins”)? Nope. Those were banned many many decades ago, at the urging of the mounted hunts who created (wait for it ... wait for it) the moral crime of “vulpicide” to describe any form of fox control OTHER than the use of dogs.
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