Stop, look and listen

I am officially fed up with pheasants.

I very nearly hit my second of the week tonight when he decided to step out in front of me, totally oblivious to the fact I was driving a ton of rusty metal and he was but a few pounds covered in puffed up look-at-me-girls feathers. He was very nearly a mangled, bloody and broken mess of gold, russet and green.

Admittedly, I had been momentarily distracted by the sight of my first spring lambs silhouetted in the twilight at the top of a hill. I braked - hard - closed my eyes and when I opened them he was gone. Off, no doubt, to seek a lady friend to impress with tales of his escape from the big blue monster with the blinding eyes.

The cock pheasant that stepped out in front of me in the Monday dawn wasn't so lucky. His body was tossed into the air, its trajectory momentarily interrupted by hitting my windscreen with a sickening thud. Instinctively, I closed my eyes again, convinced the glass was about to shatter. I cannot understand how hit-and-run drivers can claim they were not aware they had hit someone when crashing into a pheasant makes such a racket.

I hate running over pheasants but at this time of year, the lust-blinded boys pay little heed to cars. I think it's such a shame after they have survived the winter, the fox and the gun that they have such an ignoble end. If pheasants spent more time flying and less time strutting, I'm sure there would be far fewer fatalties.

Roadkill

Tis (almost) the season of slammed brakes, swerves and sweaty palms. I’ve already seen two dead badgers on the roads this week, innumerable squashed rabbits and now that the shooting season is over, the cock pheasants are starting to sniff the pheromones on the air and dandify themselves as they prepare to go looking for love.

No one taught them the Green Cross Code at school. Strutting around, their pea-sized brains overcome with lust, they don’t care if there’s a car coming – if there’s a likely lass on the other side of the road, they morph into a bloke in a club when the slow music comes on.

I have a friend who taught himself not to swerve to avoid rabbits. But I hate killing anything. My first roadkill was a duck on the A47 in Norfolk. I was doing 60mph; there was nothing I could do. I felt sick and for about five miles afterwards, my heart thumped like it does when I’m battling another bidder on eBay in the final few minutes of an auction.

But I’m not as sick as people who stop, pick up the poor unfortunate and take it home for tea. There’s a whole list of roadkill recipe books if you look on Amazon. Arthur Boyt calls himself a conservationist, but I bet his fans don’t swerve, slam on their brakes or suffer from sweating palms if they see a bunny walking the verge like a tightrope.

I don’t understand people who name animals, build up a relationship with them, then eat them, either. People like Hugh Fernley- Whittingstall, whose mantra seems to be ‘if it moves, eat it’, or Gordon Ramsey, who killed and cooked his piggies Trinny and Susannah.

My ethics have always been odd. I’m not a vegetarian: I am happy to gut a fish or remove the breasts from a still warm (shot) pheasant. But I don’t do venison, veal, or foie gras; rabbit has been off the menu since I read Watership Down as a child, and I suffer terrible pangs of conscience if I eat lamb, even though it tastes divine. Kill It, Cook It, Eat It? I don’t think so.