Sunday game shooting in France is not all that it seems. In the current issue of Le Chasseur Francais there is a picture of a man (face blacked out) releasing a pheasant from a box. The bird appears to be making off at a good speed and, according to several articles, it and many like it, never before given their liberty - i.e., completely hand-raised from the day they were hatched - may be shot before they have properly spread their wings in the new outside world. And similarly, many of the birds shot by jolly French gun-toters of a Sunday have lived until the fatal day only in coops or compounds before this release into the world of bang-bang. The caption to the picture mentioned above makes that point and adds: "The image of hunting does not emerge enhanced." This raising of game for release to the hunters/shooters is a biggish business in France. About 15,000 people, it is estimated in the magazine, are employed in it. Some people believe it is only this artificial boosting of wildlife that enables the shooting clubs to carry on in any successful way. For small game, as it is called, was becoming rare in many parts of France. Modern agricultural methods, it is known, have cut down the number of wild birds, so the proponents of inflated artificial raising have some case in their own eyes and those of the clubs.
But, if such methods are essential, why not go nearer to reality and free the birds a couple of months before the start of the season as, one of the writers argues, the British do? The birds then become more like their wild contemporaries, have some chance of learning to keep in cover, can stretch their wings and gain strength and agility. (By the way, a friend says that when the British release their birds, they still arrange odd spots where some food may still be picked up. Something like that.) Hares, believe it or not, are similarly raised for release to the guns. "Hundreds of thousands of them," writes the magazine. And "twenty million animals [birds and four-footers, presumably] are offered every year to the guns of approximately a million-and-a-half hunters - not a very natural hunt".
The editor-in-chief of the magazine praises the department of Aisne whose hunters have voted for an end to the practice of a Sunday release of birds to be shot on that day. The editor hopes for a response to the challenge. Any chance of rapid change? Hardly.