

CHAPTER IV 

 THE POACHER 



IN the last chapter we have dwelt on many points 

 dealing with the laws of sport which affect poaching, 

 and in our study of the various game, which it is the 

 object of the poacher to secure illegitimately, more 

 will be said. The days are long past when a halo of 

 sentiment hung round this law-breaker. He no longer 

 inspires the song writer or the writer of romance. 

 " The Lincolnshire poacher "and his contemporaries 

 were no doubt men with a glamour about them, instinc- 

 tive hunters, impatient of the trammels of game legisla- 

 tion, and lineal descendants of a breed of sportsmen 

 that knew not Acts of Parliament, and had no fear of 

 the power of the constable and the police court. But 

 the glamour has passed, like many a glamour of simpler 

 and freer days. The twentieth century poacher is an 

 ill-conditioned, lazy, drunken, and slinking scoundrel, 

 an enemy to law and order, without a particle of true 

 sportsmanlike feeling in his veins. Taken as a class, 

 poachers are a set of hardened criminals, careless of 

 everything but their own besotted lives. The occa- 

 sional poacher is a much rarer bird, and is the, uncurbed 



