Apparently there are 70,000 full time jobs sustained by live bird shooting in the UK, and the ‘sport’ generates revenues of over £1.5bn a year, according to a PACEC survey, paid for by the Countryside Alliance, British Association for Shooting and Conservation, and the Country Land and Business Association. Wow! That’s an awful lot of gun sellers, game keepers, dog trainers and cartridge makers – shame on my townie ways for not realising there were so many good people engaged in this charming tradition.

But wait… the report says this 70,000 includes a large number engaged services vital to shooting but not directly connected (39,000 of the total). This includes clothing manufacturers and retailers, caterers and accommodation staff, all of which the report seems to claim would go under without the 480,000 shooters who come to the countryside to practice their hobby. This confuses me as I’d always presumed shooters would be people who liked the countryside, not people who actually hated it so much that they’d never visit it again if it weren’t for the chance to phuck up a pheasant. Sure the posh eateries would have a few leaner times, but do you reckon that Heston Blumenthal would never sell another marmite and lobster sausage if his patrons were just there to walk, paint, fish and conduct affairs?

Something borne out by the report’s admission that the money here includes “partners or nonshooting friends” – presumably people who have, horrors, found another way to enjoy the countryside.

And hold on, the 31,000 ‘directly involved’ jobs look a bit fishy too:

“It is estimated that 600,000 people are involved in the provision of sporting shooting in the UK… …Much of the work is undertaken voluntarily – catering, for instance, may be provided by family members – but shooting still generates the equivalent of 31,000 full-time paid jobs.”

So as far as I know, as legitmately as claiming the equivalent of 31,000 full timers, we could claim the equivalent of 600,000 people putting in just over 2 hours a week each, about the same time they spend on the khazi.

My favourite bit of the report is where they go on to stretch one of their more kosher points until it looks like a fox between two beagles:

“Sporting shooting could not exist without conservation because, if there was no conservation, there would be nothing to shoot… …In effect, shooting provides an active army of nearly half a million conservationists – people who actually go out into the countryside, work to improve it and invest a huge amount of their own time and money in the project.”

Very true. But at the end of the day if that was their aim, and they didn’t actually shoot them, they’d be able to conserve even more, no? Point taken that shoot-managed land supports different critters to farmed land, but it’s a bit rich to suggest they’re all Johnny Morris just because they’ve managed to turn a buck out of keeping certain species artifically prominent in some areas.

More, if you’d like it, at the interestingly named www.shootingfacts.org.uk