Game shooting can be justified, student, 17, tells Government review

A 17-year-old BASC member has submitted his A-level research project on the case for game shooting to the Government’s review of the sport. Felix Hodgkinson-Last wrote his 5,000-word Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) on whether game shooting can be justified in the 21st century, and concluded that it can.

Why did he choose game shooting?

Felix told BASC he picked the subject after watching pressure grow on shooting and the countryside “from new rules and consultations to the way rural life is talked about in public debate”. “I wanted to understand the arguments properly rather than just react to them,” he said. To keep the project honest he weighed social, environmental and economic arguments on both sides, drawing on sources that included interviews with a farmer, an MP and “a person vehemently opposed to shooting”.

A 2018 Survation poll, he noted, found most people living in rural England and Wales do not shoot and do not feel it reflects their values; “but disliking an activity is not, on its own, a good reason to ban it”.

What did he find?

The strongest argument for shooting, he concluded, is the part a shoot day plays in rural life. The farmer he interviewed described a local shoot employing around 50 beaters and 15 gamekeepers, and for many people nearby the shoot is their main chance to see their neighbours. On the environment he found the arguments most finely balanced, noting the Value of Shooting report’s £500m of conservation work a year across 7.6 million hectares, against opponents’ concerns, which he says the community must answer by holding itself to the highest standards. The economic case, he found, “is hard to argue with”: £3.3bn a year to the UK economy and the equivalent of 67,000 full-time jobs.

What does he want other Shots to do?

Talking to opponents taught him that the fieldsports community “could do better at educating the public about shooting and country life”, because people who have never been on a shoot day “often imagine something very different from the reality”. His conclusion is that game shooting can be justified, provided the community does more to show people the realities of country traditions. “I spent months weighing up the evidence on both sides, and I wanted it to count for something beyond my A-levels,” he said.

What happens next

The call for evidence from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on gamebird release, shooting and welfare closed on 1 November, with Felix’s report among the submissions. The department has given no date for its response. The Value of Shooting report puts the number of people actively involved in shooting at 620,000.