Country Life
SLUR ON SPORT.
A number of letters reach me—some of them from ardent Sportsmen—urging that public opinion should be organized against such abnormal indulgences in killing birds as were reported on this page the other day. Feeling on the subject has been focussed by the widely circulated account of a " best on record " (a worst on record might be a better phrase) at Six Mile Bottom, where 1,416 partridges were killed in the day by the agency of seven men, fourteen guns and a large number of beaters. A number of quite untrue incidents have been bruited abroad, especially as to the number of birds killed by the dogs and the beaters, and the number of times particular coveys were driven over the guns. More than a thousand brace of partridges were killed on a famous Hampshire shoot last year, but bags—with apologies for the word—of this size are only possible in two or three places ; and most of the letters that have reached me concern tame pheasants, not wild partridges.
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