THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
At the present day there is no excessive destruction of hares by coursing, 
and possibly never has been. Mr Gerald Lascelles estimates that nineteen- 
twentieths of those annually killed in this country are shot. At the great 
Waterloo Coursing Meeting, he says, hardly a hundred are killed by the 
greyhounds, and the total number accounted for at all the coursing meet- 
ings of the kingdom would not reach the total destroyed by shooting 
on some of our great game -preserving manors. He refers particularly 
to the “ sixties ” and “ seventies,” that is, before the passing of the Ground 
Game Act, when hares were more numerous, and mentions the following 
bags in support of his views: 
“ On December 22, 1865, Lord Londesborough, with three other 
guns, shooting at Scoreby, in Yorkshire, killed 585 hares, besides a 
similar number of pheasants. In 1864 five guns on the Selby estate 
of the same ardent sportsman, killed 531 on November 11. On the 
Gedling estate of the late Lord Chesterfield, in Nottinghamshire, 
six guns on November 30, 1869, bagged 781, and on December 3 of 
the same year no fewer than 823 fell to the same number of guns. 
While in 1878, by six guns, at Londesborough, 1,217 were killed in 
three consecutive days in the month of December.” 
Since these statistics were penned, in 1896, it is probable that these 
totals may have been exceeded both in England and in Scotland, as they 
certainly have been in Austria, where it is the fashion to organize great 
“hare drives,” and with a large party of guns to slay more than 1,000 in a 
day. An eye-witness of one of these Austrian drives informed the writer 
that he had in this way seen 1 ,300 hares killed in a day.* 
The following letter on the subject of hares on the Wilton estate, from 
the Earl of Pembroke, addressed to the editor of “ The Field,” and dated 
from Wilton House, Salisbury, November 30, 1896, speaks for itself: 
“My attention has been called to a paragraph in your last issue 
the wording of which might convey to your readers the impression 
that a bag of 1 ,700 hares was recently made by me and my party at 
Wilton either on one day, or during the week. As a matter of fact the 
total number of hares killed during that week was 369. 1 do not know 
from what source your correspondent derived his information, but 
he may have heard that some 1 ,800 hares have been killed on this estate 
during the present season, and have thought that the number was 
party of six guns on Lord Mansfield’s Perthshire shooting on one occasion at least approached 1,300 hares 
killed in one day. " Country Life Library of Sport,” Shooting, vol. ii, p. 189. 
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