THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



341 



outlying wood, in which he knew there was little or no 

 game ; cousequently the keeper had orders to put some 

 phcasa.:ts into it the night jirevious. They had n quiet 

 time of it, and t'.ic poachers did not got at the secret. 

 In the nriOming came my lord and his party — pretty 

 good shots all of them — and famous sport they had ; so 

 good, in fact, that after lunch they wanted to go back to 

 the big wood ; but the keeper hesitated, and then ex- 

 plained : — " It was no use, my lord, going there again ; 

 they had killed a hundred and eighty-five pheasants as it 

 was, and he had only turned down a couple of hundred !" 

 This is fair enough so far ; but even under these or 

 worse circumstances, what is the finish of this fine sport ? 

 Where does the bag go to ? A greater portion of it to 

 the shop-keeper, to be sold against the farmer's beef and 

 mutton. Let any one walk through Leadenhall Market 

 during the season, or cast his eye round a country town, 

 and see the amount of game exposed for sale, and the 

 price it is offered at, and he may easily understand how 

 seriously it comes into competition with the tenant far- 

 mer's more legitimate produce. Many such a man has 

 to buy the birds, bred and fed on his land, of the poul- 

 terer ; and a short time since I knew a gentleman, whose 

 occupation is overrun with game, who bought a hare and 

 a brace of pheasants here in town, just as he might have 

 done a dish of fish, to take home with him into the 

 country. The ramifications of my subject, the abuses 

 and injustice traceable to the over-preservation of game, 

 are almost endless. Let me endeavour to epitomise 

 some of them. In the first place, the higher or the bet- 

 ter farming, the more green crops, and so on, the 

 greater the damage. The hare is an exquisite, who 

 just tastes and tries, and then passes on, leaving the 

 work of destruction either to the other offenders, or 

 to gradual decay. Then, the greater the head of 

 game, the stricter it is preserved, the more 

 also will there be of other kind of vermin. This 

 is an indisputable fact, and an old sportsman and a 

 master of harriers that I met in the park a week 

 or so since, urged me strongly not to pass it over. 

 Keepers may profess to kill rats and hedgehogs, and 

 perhaps they do when they can find them ; but they de- 

 stroy far more systematically the great enemies of such 

 a class of depredators. They shoot the terriers that 

 kill the rats, they trap the cats that kill the mice, and 

 they wage war against the hawks and owls. The balance 

 of nature is, as it were, upset ; and only that the farmer 

 should suffer more and more from such a revolution. 

 No one who has lived in the neighbourhood of a heavy 

 game-preserver but knows the difficulty there is to keep 

 either a cat or a dog. A cat, though, that has once 

 taken to poaching, is said to be ever afterwards but a 

 bad mouser. I have reason to believe poor pussy is 

 often positively enticed in»o mischief. There is a chemi- 

 cal called valerian, to the fmell of which cats are amaz- 

 ingly partial ; and should a bait be rubbed over with it 

 they will come a long way by the force of such an at- 

 traction. We may midce a tolerably good guess who is 

 answerable here, just as we can for the hare in the wire, 

 laid temptingly by the path of the poor man on his way 

 home or to his work. As for dogs, if I recollect cor- 

 rectly, some disinterested and reasonable man once said, 

 publicly, that a farmer had no business with any dogs on 

 his place, and that the very shepherd's colly was an un- 

 necessary nuisance, doing little more than disturbing 

 the game, and calling his master's eye to it. But even 

 beyond this, over what the tenant-farmer loses either 

 by game or vermin, the system of over- preservation ac- 

 tually interferes with the proper pursuit of his business. 

 There was a favourite clause in some of the Norfolk 

 lettings, that an occupier should not drill his turnips 

 nor mov, his wheat, Drilling caused the birds to run, and 

 mowing left them no sheltrr, I was in hopes we had 



been growing out of this. But it is only a year or two 

 since that the tenantry of a nobleman in the Midlands 

 were ordered not to employ a reaping machine ! I do not 

 know what Messrs. Burgess and Key, or Mr. Crosskill, 

 would say to this ; but the farmers of England are, I am 

 happy to add, not sunk quite ;o low, and they success- 

 fully resisted so monstrous and so unwarrantable an inter- 

 ference. Still the direct effect of the system is to humiliate 

 and to lower their spirits and energies. How can a man 

 properly respect himself when he knows he is more or less 

 at the mercy of an ignorant self-sufficient underling .' How 

 can he do his best, when he knows his best efforts will 

 be eventually thwarted, and all he has d;>ne as continually 

 undone .' What pride can he have in an occupation 

 where a keeper can report and direct him .' And where 

 hares and rabbits rob him alike of his credit and his 

 profit ? Game-preserving lessens the production of the 

 soil, stays the full employment of capital, and mars the 

 fair aim of industry and ability. The most offensive 

 feature, however, associated with this question is that 

 which arises when the landlord does not take the shoot- 

 ing himself, nor permit the tenant to have it. So long 

 as a gentleman sports over his own property there is 

 some hope. An accident may open his eyes to the abuse, 

 or his own innate sympathies prompt him to a better 

 course of proceeding. But let a stranger have the 

 manor — a swell tailor from Regent-street, or a smart 

 solicitor from Chancery-lane. What do such as these 

 care for the tenant or his feelings, or his rights or his 

 wrongs ? What do they know of the old place or the 

 old Family .' Thoy have simply hired the shooting, and 

 they mean to keep as much game as they can. They 

 are often heard to boast that they more than pay their 

 expenses from what they kill — and sell. The bigger 

 bully and blackguard the keeper the more they like him. 

 He has the tenants in proper order. And picture an 

 English tenant-farmer of this present era, with educa- 

 tion, capital, intelligence and spirit to warrant his taking 

 his proper place in society, having to submit to such de- 

 gradation as this. To be patronized in his own home 

 and before his own people by some cockney gent who 

 will tell him, " 'Tis fine times for you farmers 1" and 

 who " will see about it and hear what my keeper 

 says," when you go, cap in hand, and ask him for a 

 day's coursing. Again, I feel proud to say there are 

 many above this, and who would never see a hare 

 turned rather than thus prostrate themselves. But 

 they feel the insult inflicted upon them — not so 

 much by the stranger as by their landlord and his 

 agent — at every step they take and every look they 

 give. I have already referred to the well-known fact 

 of how much the farmer suffers from poaching, 

 as well as game-preserving. He pays for the one 

 a terrible tithe in corn and roots, and for the other 

 as heavy in rates and county expense;?. At the 

 first blush, it would seem that the farmer could have 

 little to urge against the poacher, who only goes to re- 

 lieve him of some of that excess from which he suffers so 

 much. And really, under the circumstances, I do not 

 think the tenants are very determinedly hostile to such 

 trespassers. In simple truth, few of us are. Poaching 

 is an insidious disorder. It gradually grows upon a 

 man ; and poaching itself is by no means regarded as 

 amongst the higher order of crimes. We are all shy of 

 engaging with a confirmed drunkard or a convicted thief, 

 but the poacher's character is not so hopelessly gone. You 

 may find many a man on a farm still, strongly suspected 

 of a quiet taste for wiring a hare or bringing down a 

 pheasant. But perhaps the finest proof that a poacher 

 is fit for better things, is in the fact that he is often taken 

 into employment as a keeper or watcher by those who of 

 all others have been tlie most bitter against him. You 

 mu^t not suppose that I am upholding such practices. 



