Vegetarian subversion of the old fashioned hunting club
Seeking forgiveness for a sin I committed in 1993.
When I was doing my PhD fieldwork in Tanzania lots of kind people helped me out.
One was the head of a health project who asked if I could analyse a pile of data - which I did, and the project paid me. I used the money for my own fieldwork costs and so reduced my pile of debt.
I owed him a favour, so when he asked me to help write a leaflet for his and his wife’s club, I said yes. They explained that the task was to turn their German English into more fluid English. The leaflet was to advertise the club and attract new members.
What was the club? He took me to their kitchen and lifted the lid of a very large chest freezer. A handsome buffalo’s head peered back at me.
The club was a rather niche big game hunting club in which members dressed up in clothes from the early 1900s and killed animals using vintage rifles and ammunition (this struck an ironic chord as my Welsh grandfather served in East Africa in World War I, fighting the old style Tanganyika Germans, though it was smaller enemies - mosquitoes and malaria parasites - that gave Taid his ‘life changing injuries’).
Sili Nyama*
I was already 5 years a vegetarian by then, and generally against hunting, though not very squeamish. The vintage dressing struck me as particularly weird (I guess these days we would call it cosplay). But I owed him a favour.
My act of gentle vegetarian subversion was to rewrite the leaflet using language that was as violent and negative as possible.
Decimate. Destroy. Mutilate. Maim. Persecute. Hound. Defenceless. Execute.
Modern killers
I’m still a vegetarian, though I am friends with small farmers and others who hunt things - mainly foxes, rabbits, pheasants. ‘Birds for the pot’. They humour me. “Pete, I’ve got a brace of lettuces for you in the back of the wagon”.
I’m a bundle of inconsistencies. I think there are few greater pleasures in life than walking out in the spring with a shepherd looking for new lambs and helping ewes struggling with labour. I help them but don’t eat them. But someone else will.
Foxes kill lambs so Easter is the peak fox killing season. I find that it is increasingly about efficiency and minimising trauma, helped on by many hunters’ love of high tech kit. Though I tease the hunters that they like to nearly kill all of the foxes, leaving just enough to have some to kill next year too.
Last year I had an interesting chat with a young woman sheep farmer who talked about the merits of using infrared scopes to hunt foxes at night. She is passionate about the delicate ecology of the mountainside that her family has farmed for generations (they have known my family for generations too), and she was glad that they no longer go ‘lamping’ - shining a bright light that scares the fox senseless before shooting it from relatively close range. Instead, they can watch the fox going about its business from afar, unaware of any human presence or interest. Then boom. Dead.
No dressing up in bonnets or using archaic weapons. No chasing.
I stopped eating meat after the disgust of visiting intensive chicken farms when I was a teenage swan catcher (cue stock pic) of swan boy.
And also a challenge for Lent - either give up beer or give up meat. I chose meat and never went back. I am not against meat per se, but am in favour of minimising trauma and ecological damage, and maximising animal welfare. I keep on giving up eating fish and then starting again, but aim to eat the sustainable types.
A bundle of inconfishtencies.
*One of the first Kiswahili phrases that every vegetarian learns.