Shooting rabbits

When I was about six years old, my father taught me how to shoot.

No doubt this was an act of gross irresponsibility on his part. I’m sure that if my childhood had been delayed by a generation or two, then instead of playing Cowboys and Indians, with toy guns and rolls of paper caps, I would have probably grown up doing something far less corrupting – alone, in my bedroom, surfing the internet.

But Dad’s shotguns were real, and local farmers used to pay him half a Crown for each dead fox. My diet, in those days of brilliant blue skies, was never long without rabbit or pheasant.

I remember my first air rifle – a Diana 23 Junior – and how it seemed to take me forever to line up the front sight, as my under-length arms struggled to hold the heavy barrel steady. My intended prey had usually bolted long before I pulled the trigger.

Half a century slipped by before I took aim again, this time with a much more powerful Chinese-made .22. This modern rifle has a telescopic sight, which I can easily adjust for wind, and I’m pleased to report that so far not a single lead pellet has been wasted.

The target of my new-found sniping is the legion of rabbits which have colonised the wood, and which now seem determined to march upon the house, digging holes all over the field on their way.

Until a few months ago, most mornings I counted a dozen bunnies on the lawn – before silently sliding open the bedroom window, taking aim, and slowly reducing their number, one at a time. The rabbits do now seem to be getting the message.

I relate this part of my daily pre-breakfast routine not to upset any animal lovers: I enjoy seeing rabbits in the wild; I just enjoy rather less seeing what they do to my garden.

Rabbits remain one of Britain’s major agricultural pests, even though today they present nothing like the epidemic which we faced prior to the introduction of myxomatosis in 1953. Nevertheless, the 1954 Pests Act not only allows me to shoot rabbits on my land, it actually obliges me to prevent their spread to my neighbours.

Measures other than shooting appear disproportionate – I would need a huge amount of fencing, which the government says would have to be designed to keep the rabbits in, rather out. The fences would also need badger gates. The use of ferrets, for me, would be too time-consuming and I have always disliked the idea of traps. The Health and Safety Executive even publishes advice on how to kill rabbits using poison gas, but I’m afraid that – to me – sounds like a disaster just waiting to happen.

There seems to be no shortage of organisations urging me to Do Something About The Rabbits – Defra, Natural England and Cornwall Council all say that pests must be controlled, but none of them is offering to do the job for me.

My dead rabbits end up in a small incinerator, completely in accordance with 21st century health and environmental regulations. I would much prefer to cook and eat them, but I simply don’t have time. If any local butcher wants them, no payment need change hands.

Busy doing nothing

About a year ago the government promised us it was on a mission to create a “paradise” for bees. Next weekend I plan to join in with this national exercise in pollinator-promotion and build a beehive. It will be tucked away, in an old orchard, and with luck the bees, due to arrive in the spring, will mostly look after themselves.

As I now seem to have the space, and time, I’m more than happy to help heed the warning of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature: more than a quarter of European bumblebees – and nearly one in 10 of all honeybees – are at risk of extinction.


The government’s initiative, 12 months ago, saw Defra putting bee hives on the roof of its headquarters. I wonder how that’s working, given that the roofs of Whitehall are not blessed with an over-supply of flora. 

Only a cynic would suggest it was simply a photo-op for an otherwise unknown minister.


The press release heralded “Motorway verges, railway embankments and forests will be used to create bee and insect friendly paradises as part of the major new strategy to protect the 1,500 species of pollinators in England.” I have to confess to my ignorance about what a “bee paradise” actually looks like, but I’d be surprised if it included the miles of plastic cones which seem permanently to adorn motorway verges.


Attached to the press release was a 36-page glossy document titled The National Pollinator Strategy. “Over the next 10 years it will build a solid foundation to bring about the best possible conditions for bees and other insects to flourish,” it says.


The strategy encouraged us to plant more flowers, particularly wild flowers, cut the grass less frequently, not to disturb insect nests and to “think carefully about whether to use pesticides.”


I can only imagine the mayhem in Defra High Command as officials argued over whether or not to use such inflammatory language. After all, the government is currently facing a High Court battle over its decision to exempt some of the dangerous chemical pesticides banned by the European Union, following lobbying by the National Farmers Union on behalf of Big Cereal – an industrial sector where crop-spraying has been endemic since the end of the Second World War. Farmers say the chemicals are needed to protect crops from devastation by the cabbage stem flea beetle.


The European Food Safety Authority says the pesticides clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam pose a “high risk” to bees when sprayed on leaves – yet the government seems determined to ignore its own Pollinator Strategy. A case of “do as I say, not as I do?”

Bringing home the bacon

I said goodbye to my pigs last week. They were back within days, enjoying an even-more-carefree space, in the freezer.

The pigs had spent five months helping clear my overgrown wood, and although I’ve raised a small amount of cash through sales of the occasional joint, I’m very much an amateur. The pigs were an enjoyable and useful hobby, roaming free in the wood, removing brambles, blackthorn and stinging nettles. They were also surprisingly good company.

The scale of my agricultural interests is vanishingly small. I live on a St Mabyn smallholding with chickens, ducks and geese, and occasional sheep, and although I am registered with the Rural Payments Agency and Defra’s Animal Health department, I certainly don’t claim to know very much about the practical side of farming.

I was surprised, therefore, to get a phone call from Cornwall Council’s Trading Standards office, inviting me to join their register, too. Trading Standards had picked up on the computerised record of animal movements, and wanted a bit more information to find out what I was up to. A brief conversation ended with the Trading Standards official politely declining my invitation to visit – his records were up to date, and he was happy.

Some might see this as an unwarranted intrusion into privacy, or an example of how bureaucrats are driving small-scale operators out of agriculture. I am not one of them. Despite my lack of expertise, I welcome anything that drives up standards of bio-security and animal welfare.

Pigs are notoriously prone to disease. More than a decade ago, I reported in considerable detail on the Foot and Mouth epidemic which closed down the countryside and brought the British livestock sector to its knees.

I am also old enough to remember the 1967 Foot and Mouth outbreak, when I first learned of some of the biology behind disease transmission – and of how Foot and Mouth disease used to be endemic in Britain, with most rural communities harbouring the illness to some degree at some time.

In those “good old” days nearly all agriculture was local. Whatever disease there rarely spread beyond the nearest market, and seldom lasted long. But it was there nonetheless. Now that animals can be transported hundreds of miles, the risks of a national disaster are vastly increased, and only one batch of dodgy pig food away.

So well done Cornwall Trading Standards. As they say at MI5, the price of security is eternal vigilance.

60 = the new 40? Fingers crossed

Please don't nuke Bradford

Follow @GrahamSmithCR
Yesterday's media meltdown over Jeremy Corbyn giving a straight answer to a straight question, and sticking consistently to a position he has held for his entire political life, tells us much about how the Labour Party's coming debate over nuclear weapons is likely to be played out.

I'm no pacifist and can think of a few wars in which I would have volunteered to fight, had I been born in the 1920s rather than the 1950s.  As it was, the big war of my generation was in Vietnam, and I spent several of my younger years trying to stop it. Pondering the victory of the North Vietnamese Army over the United States has made me consider a historic perspective on how we can best deal with the threats to Britain's security today.

Once upon a time, in a fairyland of castles and knights on horseback, wars were won by a fearsome weapon of mass destruction.  It was called the Longbow, and in the hands of skilled archers it could rain down death from the skies from the safe distance of nearly 400 yards.  At some point in the Middle Ages, the Kings began to wonder if the Longbow might have outlived its usefulness.  The idea of firing muskets, and canons, would soon become a reality.

You can imagine how those deliberations must have sounded.  The Longbow Manufacturers' Union would have been furious.  "What about our jobs?" they would have cried.  The word went round that those who advocated getting rid of Longbows were traitors who would leave the country defenceless.

Yet slowly, very slowly, armies learned that they could win wars without the Longbow.  Even the muskets and canons eventually gave way to tanks and aeroplanes, as wars themselves constantly evolved, and it wasn't long before concepts like "cyber-terrorism" and tools like robotic drones were soaking up all the hot money.

There were some Kings who were so stupid that while all this was going on were determined to stick with the Longbow.  History records that they lost.

And so it is with the Trident nuclear submarine system.  A concept designed to end World War Two in 1945 still consumes £100billion of Britain's defence budget more than 70 years later.  There was once a bizarre, deeply immoral logic to its existence, called Mutually Assured Destruction, as a handful of so-called "superpowers" manoeuvred for position on the global stage while threatening to end all life on Earth if they didn't get their way.  The MAD doctrine ended when the superpowers realised that what they really needed was access to the planet's resources, all over the world, and that this involved strategic alliances with client states whose leaders could be replaced whenever they stepped out of line.

Nuclear weapons have always been beyond the reach of poor people, and in some parts of the world those people found new ways to wage wars.  They realised that nuclear weapons were powerless against an idea, and so they set about spreading ideas.  Mostly these were very bad ideas, like hijacking aeroplanes and flying them into tall buildings in the United States, killing thousands of completely innocent civilians.  

In Britain, a handful of young men from Bradford went to London one day with the very bad idea of blowing up innocent people on buses and underground trains.  But the point was that no matter how poor they were, these people could wage war without nuclear weapons.

The only way of defeating these "ideas" people was through the collection of vast amounts of intelligence, to interrupt their plans before they could do any harm.  But the Kings and Queens of the 21st Century were, like their Longbow predecessors from several hundred years previously, so stupidly obsessed with their expensive-but-out-of-date weapons' system that they could not see the solution.

I can't think of any good reasons for dropping an atom bomb on Bradford.  Defeating terrorism certainly isn't one of them.  But £100billion buys you an awful lot of spies.

You don't have to be a pacifist to want to ban the bomb.  You have to pick your wars - and want to win them.

Porkie pies?

I'd just like to make it clear that David Cameron has never been alone with any of my pigs...

By the company we keep?

So, in order to articulate views which are 100% in line with mainstream United Nations policy, Jeremy Corbyn once shared a platform with Dyab Abou Jahjah - and now some people are suggesting "guilt by association."

Surely these couldn't by any chance be the same people who once thought Tony Blair would deliver us from evil...

At least Jeremy Corbyn hasn't, as far as I know, tried to sell weapons to any Middle East despots....