Do You Ken John Peel?

Do You Ken John Peel?

My daughter Abi turned thirteen recently and as head of the family she
thinks it's about time her parents became vegetarians. She has been a
convert, with occasional lapses, for around two years. I'm certainly
not against the idea. We hardly eat meat anyway; just the odd bacon
sandwich and an extremely rare steak (rare in the numerical rather than
the French culinary sense), but it would be good to lose that feeling
of guilt experienced when a cow looks at you over the fence with those
mournful eyes.

Actually the cow is not at all sad - it's probably wondering if you are
going to pass it some of that long green grass on the other side of the
fence, but the guilt is real enough.

Of course, not everybody feels that way. In another life I used to be a
musician and I remember driving to a gig with a black American blues
singer called Johnnie Mars. I pointed out some ducks which were flying
low over the band bus in formation. Johnnie looked up and said yep, he
thought they were mighty fine, and after a moment, 'Especially with
roast potatoes'.

This was said without a trace of irony. He told me later, with the same
straight face, that he was well known in East Poland and Latvia, which
reminded me irresistibly of Dorothy Parker's line about being famous in
two continents - 'Greenland and Iceland'.

Anyway, as I said, I'd like to become a vegetarian, but I think you
have to pick the right time. It's like giving up smoking, something I
finally managed to do ten years ago after many attempts. One day, all
the conditions were right and I stopped, just like that.

That's how I imagine it would be when giving up meat, although as far
as I know, meat is not addictive. There'll be no retrievals of half
used packs of bacon from the bin, or furtive trips to the corner shop,
('Just going to take the dog around the block, dear. Won't be
long').

These ruminations (isn't that what cows do? - Ed) were brought on by
the fact that we've recently moved house. We're now twelve miles
further north and within sight of the Moray Firth. (In Scotland an
estuary is called a firth, so for example we have the Firth of Forth -
see?). Anyway, in those few miles, we've moved out of the Highlands and
onto the coastal plain, which drops gently down to the sea, about six
miles away, giving us a clear view of the few solitary cottages and
farmhouses in the area, plus the remains of Duffus castle and the
Lossiemouth lighthouse.
All this is very different from the Highlands, with its hills and
valleys, rough ravines and forests. Almost a different country, almost
a different people. Before the Jacobite uprising in the 18th century
and the subsequent destruction of the clan system, the 'wild, wykked
hieland men' used to swoop down onto the coastal plain, steal all the
cattle they could cope with, burn a few cottages and disappear back
into the hills.

Well, the clans are no longer a force, and instead there are large
shooting estates, sometimes owned by old established families and
sometimes by wealthy newcomers. Clients pay the equivalent of the price
of a good second hand car for a few days shooting. We used to live in a
farmhouse right in the middle of one of these estates. Pheasants were
as common as pigeons and sparrows are in town. It was not at all
unusual to see two or three elderly gents stroll past our house,
stepping stiff-legged over barbed wire fences (ouch), with their broken
shotguns cradled over one arm and their labradors at heel.

Now, you might think I'm out of sympathy with the hunting fraternity,
and you'd be right, up to a point, although it's true I did a lot of
fishing in my early teens, and I once owned a beautiful .22 BSA air
rifle with an oiled stock and a rifled barrel. I gave up fishing when I
discovered girls, and I exchanged the rifle for my first guitar and
never looked back.

As a young teenager, part of my reading was about the safari hunters of
Africa and India, last of a dying breed. One of the most interesting of
these was Jim Corbett. He became well known as a writer and his best
book was probably 'The Man-Eaters of Kumaon'. He had respect and even
love for the man-eaters that he had to shoot. He was not just a hunter;
he was also a naturalist and an early conservationalist, who warned
against 'the indiscriminate hunting of the tiger, which if not
controlled would eventually deprive India of the finest of her
fauna'.

About this time I discovered two great American writers; Hemingway via
'The Green Hills of Africa', written in 1933, and William Faulkner
through 'The Bear'. Written in 1942 as a long short story, 'The Bear'
is Faulkner at his prophetic best. It's about a group of men and boys
who go on a hunting trip every year', and each time they have to drive
further to find the wilderness as the Mississippi Delta shrinks. At the
time the story was written, conservation was not at all fashionable,
nor was it twenty years later when I read it, but it made me realize
that there could be a link between hunting and conservation.

I have no desire to hunt or shoot any animal, but I'm hardly in a
position to criticize anyone else while I still eat meat. The arguments
in favour of hunting are not easy to refute. For instance, it's claimed
that without foxhunting, farmers would quickly eradicate the fox and
that in Scotland the Red deer population would soar without adequate
control.

Maybe, but I can't help thinking Oscar Wilde got it right when he wrote
about 'The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable'. Besides, as a
solution to the deer population problem, I'm for the re-introduction of
the wolf, absent from the Scottish Highlands since before Bonnie Prince
Charlie went home to Italy. This is a serious and considered
proposition, now championed by the Green Party, and it feels right to
me. It works in Montana - why not here in the Highlands? In the
meantime, at least I've moved out of earshot of the shotguns on the
estate.
James Collins

www.jamescollins.org
Email: collinsdallasart@tiscali.co.uk