Laurence Catlow - Confessions of a Shooting Fishing Man

This diary was written for my own pleasure, to celebrate my joy in the countryside that surrounds me and my delight to be out in it with a fishing rod or with a spaniel and a shot gun. It was written for my own pleasure and satisfaction; if it gives others pleasure, then it will give me all the more satisfaction.

It was written two years ago, at a time when I sensed that many shooters and hunting men, in spite of their passionate belief in the innocent and wholesome nature of their sporting pursuits, had acknowledged that the mood of the times was against them and that their days as hunters and shooters were drawing to a close. I was troubled by the way in which they seemed to accept the imminent death of fox-hunting, and the less imminent but hardly less certain end of shooting for sport, as part of the irresistible process by which urban men were imposing their values on the traditional pattern of rural life.

I was troubled too by the evasive and unconvincing nature of the arguments produced in defence of fieldsports by those who felt themselves qualified to speak up on their behalf. And, although as a fisherman I did not feel seriously concerned for the immediate future of angling, there was a nagging suspicion that, if killing foxes and pheasants should ever be declared immoral and illegal, some rudimentary regard for equity or for intellectual consistency must eventually persuade our law-givers to a similar pronouncement concerning the killing of trout. Perhaps this was an unfounded suspicion.

I have kept a sporting diary for years, usually a bare record of fish caught and birds shot, in some years an attempt to preserve for myself something of the individual flavour of my shooting and fishing days. Two years ago I decided that the time had come for another diary of the more ambitious sort. I decided too, perhaps in response to the despondency of my shooting and hunting friends, to use it as a means of exploring my beliefs as a sportsman, in the hope that I might see more clearly why fishing and shooting are so important to me and why I have always held them, properly pursued, to be blameless activities.

This diary was not written to convert others to my way of thinking; it was written rather for my own benefit, to elucidate to myself the nature of my thoughts about killing birds and fish for pleasure. If it should happen that it turns hunt saboteurs into aspiring masters of foxhounds or shoot captains, I shall be delighted. More likely is that it will help fellow fishers and shooters to unravel a few strands of their attachment to field-sports and may stimulate some of them to develop arguments more convincing, and perhaps more succinct, than any advanced by me.

Most of this diary is not directly concerned with the morality of killing animals. It is about the countryside and, unavoidably, it is about me. I should have liked to keep me out of it as much as possible. But it has proved very difficult to keep me out of my own diary. I think that I am probably the worst thing about my diary, and my advice to anyone who buys this book and bothers to read this preface is that, in reading what follows it, he should try to forget all about me and to concentrate instead on the fields and the woods and the riverbanks where I spend so much of my time. For, if I have managed to convey some impression, however adumbrated, of the beauty of that part of England which it is my privilege to call home, then this diary has not been written in vain.

Laurence Catlow
Sedbergh, August 1996