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The Environmental Effects of Blood Sports in Lowland England since 1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

ERIC L. JONES
ERIC L. JONES*
Affiliation:
Melbourne Business School, 200 Leicester Street, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia and University of Exeter, The Queen's Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4QJ, UK
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Abstract

This paper considers the effects of blood sports on the landscape, wildlife and farming, and assesses the implications of the topic for some matters of historical interpretation. Histories of individual sports written by practitioners are rarely candid about the environmental costs and even descriptions by professional historians tend to neglect the dynamic ecological consequences. Ritualised foxhunting supplanted more effective control and encouraged pests. Any benign consequences were incidental. Thanks to commercial money, shooting intensities held up well even during agricultural depressions. Game preservation, notably of pheasants, meant heavy pressure on birds of prey and other wild species; planting woodland was the main benign effect, although this simultaneously fostered so-called pests. Killing species that competed with game eliminated some wildlife but often proved self-defeating in the long term. Angling had mixed implications for waterside wildlife, although riverine habitats were lastingly modified when sport-fishing replaced fishing for food. Hunting and shooting meant some withdrawal of land from farming and interference with rotations: these activities reduced productivity. That the national economy could ‘afford’ to divert so many resources to elite sports contradicts the dominant view that England came up against a resources barrier.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 51 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

Notes

1. McGregor, O. R., Introduction to the fifth edition of Lord Ernle, English Farming Past and Present (London, 1961), pp. cxliii–cxlivGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to J. L. Anderson and to members of the environmental history seminar at the Cornwall Campus of Exeter University for comments on this paper.

2. The forgotten pioneering author among the exceptions was Colin Tubbs. See his The New Forest: An Ecological History (Newton Abbot, 1968), several other books, and many articles.

3. I am drawn to the subject partly for reasons of my family's history, since I descend on one side from a line of gamekeepers and on the other from some notable poachers, about whom there is a certain amount of documentation. Further mention of them is nevertheless excluded at the behest of referees. There seemed to me, however, solid grounds for having alluded to them in the first draft. A personal approach offers immediacy and authenticity; acts as a focusing device that reduces the scatter of examples without eliminating their diversity; and humanises writing along the lines of personal notes familiar from the work of landscape historians like W. G. Hoskins or Maurice Beresford. Oral history and family history are respectable nowadays and have been harnessed to broad ends. Whether or not Ralph Waldo Emerson was correct in saying that all history is biography, the method is prevalent, few court cases proceed without personal testimony, and business history, at least, commonly relies on interviews. It seems illogical to be able to refer to others’ ancestors but not one's own and the reader should understand that mine are present here in the background. The alternative pretends to an implausibly ‘scientific’ detachment.

4. Insofar as my interest goes beyond the historical it is influenced by a lifetime as a naturalist. I do not, however, belong to any conservation organisation.

5. Occasional supporters have long admitted the involvement of cruelty. Thus ‘Ardaros’ began an article on ‘Cruelty in Sport’ in the Shooting Times, 30th November 1918, with the pronouncement that, ‘A certain amount of cruelty in sport is, I am afraid, unavoidable, but all true sportsmen will as much as possible try to minimise such cruelty.’ (Shooting Times & Country Magazine, 125 Years of Shooting Times 1882–2007 (London, 2007), pp. 29–30). The continued frequency of ‘runners’ (wounded pheasants) shows that his admonitions have not been closely followed. And if the jury is still out regarding whether fish feel pain, it would surely be logical to refrain from sport angling until the issue has been decided.

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55. http://www.midcurrent.com

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71. See e.g. Wilson, R. H., Just for a Lark (Abingdon, 1970), p. 55Google Scholar. These otherwise excluded groups had always wished to shoot and fish. Hawker observed in the depression year 1816 that, around the towns, birds were ‘contended for by half the lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, sporting parsons and tradesmen in the place.’ (Quoted by Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, p. 102).

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74. Lord Eliot was reserving the right to hawk alongside rights to hunt and fish in leases of his estate at Latton, Wiltshire, as late as 1812. (Cornwall Record Office EL/813).

75. Reproduced in Hoyle (ed.), Our Hunting Fathers, p. 20.

76. Hastings, Max, Country Fair (London, 2005), p. 250Google Scholar.