224 SHOOTING THE PARTRIDGE 



A farm will perfectly support a certain proportion 

 of hares, and where none are allowed to live and 

 there is great hostility to game generally, the farming 

 will usually be found to be bad. I have seen, in 

 certain parts of Scotland, where the tenants were all 

 anti-Game Law Radicals, some of the worst crops 

 imaginable. There were tons of weeds, but not a 

 hare to be found, and very little of any other game. 



The hare, with his four or five pounds of good 

 flesh, and useful skin, is too valuable an animal to be 

 treated as vermin, but he should never be allowed to 

 disturb friendly relations with good farmers, nor to 

 interfere with the interests of the partridge. 



The many wonderful records given in chapters ii. 

 and viii., vol. i., of ' Shooting,' in the Badminton 

 Library may be studied with interest, and give rise to 

 some reflections and comparisons. In the Holkham 

 totals, for instance, it will be observed that in the 

 years 1797, 1798, and 1800 more partridges were killed 

 on the estate than in 1868 and 1869, the two best 

 seasons of that decade. There are several scores, which 

 I need not here reproduce, proving that very large bags 

 of partridges were made at the end of the last and 

 the beginning of the present century, both on the 

 Continent and in Great Britain. A little later the 

 totals of partridges begin to deteriorate, and those of 



