TWENTY-FIVE years ago the fashion was to decry 

 driving game, and to hold up, as the good old sporting 

 plan, the use of gun-dogs in the pursuit of partridges and grouse. 

 But this was only a fashion of the fashionless. Shooters were 

 not so childish as to decline to shoot in one method because 

 they could not do it in the other, and half the grouse moors and 

 three-quarters of the partridge ground then, as now, could not be 

 worked with pointers and setters without sacrifice of a large 

 portion of the game. Either it was driven away for wiser 

 neighbours to bag, or else it died of old age after doing as 

 much harm to its successors as any early Hanoverian king of 

 England that is, as much as possible. The reasons for the 

 growth of wildness are many, but in dealing with dogs it is 

 only necessary to take the birds as we find them, and to get 

 them in the most sporting fashion that is left open to us. 



At the same time, it may be remarked that the Press 

 changed completely round after the publication of the Badminton 

 shooting books, and it became as unfashionable to write of 

 shooting over dogs as it had been to write of driving. 



But the views expressed in the Badminton books were 

 drawn from Yorkshire and Norfolk, and the result was that this 

 time both sportsmen and the Press attempted to force an 

 imitation of those methods that in those counties had only 

 been adopted as a choice of two evils, when birds became so 

 wild that it was a question of driving or no game. This fashion 

 has made the act of shooting take rank above the all-embracing 

 "sportsmanship" in the minds of those who have grasped at 



and acquired the first-named part without aiming at the whole. 



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