How to Hunt Rabbits with an Air Rifle

The sticky, boiled down, concentrated essence of the first year of Hubert's rabbit hunting could be expressed as follows:

• If in the UK, get a rifle that'll shoot at about 11.5ftlb with a variety of pellets (because one that'll shoot 'just under' 12ftlb with the pellet you use most often will still send you to prison if the pellet the police happen to test it with pops the chrono 'just over').

• Get permission from a landowner. Ask around, dress smartly, knock on doors, don't show up drunk, don't bother asking by post or phoning (you'll just irritate them and lessen the chances they'll be friendly to the folk that actually bother to ask them personally). Accept refusals with good grace and retire politely. Keep going till you get one.

• Once you have a permission, don't bugger it up by being narky to dog walkers and hikers: one word to the police from an irritated Labrador owner and you are back to yearning fruitlessly over copies of  AirGun Weekly (or in jail). Look after the land that you have permission to shoot on: don't knacker the fences; don't leave litter; don't take a pop at that out-building gutter when you're bored and stay well away from any livestock on the land. You are an ambassador for hunting now and there are plenty of ill-informed people who would have the whole thing banned - so don't give them ammunition.

• Learn how to shoot the gun accurately before attempting to shoot your dinner. Practising on live quarry is an utter no-no. Join an air-rifle club or a Field Target club - but practise. You do not have to be pellet-on-pellet perfect at 75 yards but you will have to practise a good deal before you start hunting unless you are going out specifically to pointlessly maim wildlife (and you shouldn't be). If you can get consistent groups within one inch at thirty yards - from the positions that you'll be using in the field - then you've reached the minimum level to start hunting proper. There's no need to stay at this minimum level however, so do keep practising.

• You don't really need a full-body, army-sniper ghillie suit; drab clothing, greeny-brown in colour will do nicely. Don't go out hunting in your safety-orange work wear. Don't put highly perfumed fabric conditioner in your washing machine if you're cleaning your hunting gear.

• You don't need a scope that can shift focus between your outstretched finger and the surface of the moon when your effective shooting range is only up to 40 yards. In summer, you can go out mid-afternoon and find rabbits; in the cooler months however, dawn and dusk will be the best times to hunt and, because this is so, a scope that gathers as much light as possible will be helpful - as will an illuminated reticule. This isn't to say that you can't hunt at dusk with an unilluminated 30mm objective lens: you can. But something between 40 and 50mm will allow you to hunt for a good deal longer. If you can afford the light-up reticule, then get one.

• Consider using see-through mounts for your scope. These aren't that easy to get your hands on but I think they might well mean - for scopes around the 40mm mark - that you could use the iron sights as well as the scope, and this might well give you a little bit more flexibility about the shots you can take and the speed with which you can take them.

• If you can afford that Airwolf, great, (and while you're here, mister Moneybags, can you see that 'Donate' button to the left?) but you don't need to spend a grand on a gun.

• If what you want to do is get rabbits for the table and you can afford a pre-charged pneumatic rifle (and the kit that goes with it) and you are not too fussed about getting off more than a hundred shots in an afternoon's shooting (and dear God why would you want to?) - then get one. You will hear people going on about the 'romance of the springer' and 'Oh, it's so much more satisfying shooting with a spring gun' but PCP's are more accurate and will put more rabbits in the pot and that's why you're doing it, not for the joy of the action and the challenge (unless of course you are and in which case, good luck to you).

• If you can't afford a PCP then buy a decent springer and get good at shooting with what you can afford. A well-made springer, in the hands of someone who has learned how to shoot one, will do the job perfectly.

• Yes, Crosman 2250 Ratcatchers are cheap and nifty - sadly, they don't do the job.

• Those Chinese-made CO2 rifles are well made, affordable and can indeed, with a bit of fettling, rival the PCP's for accuracy. CO2, however, is not a free commodity and in cold weather you can get a considerable drop in pressure which will have a knock-on effect on accuracy (and not a good one).

• Dome headed pellets give the best combination of accuracy and efficiency. Cheap pellets are a false economy since they're inevitably less well made and therefore less predictable in flight. If you buy pellets on-line for economy then try to arrange it so that the Postie does not just pop them through your letterbox: the three-foot drop to the floor will render half the tin unusable.

• If you can afford the PCP it probably makes sense to get it in .177 calibre. There is more whack in a .22 but all the whack in the world will not put a rabbit in the pot if you miss - and it's trickier judging distance with the steeper parabolic arc of a .22 pellet. 
• 
  

• Yep, a .20 is probably a good compromise and no, you don't see many of them around second hand.

• With a springer, I've honestly no idea if there's much difference between .177 and .22 but with a .22 you can reasonably look to take pigeons as well as rabbits because a .22 will drop a pigeon (if you hit it) more effectively than the smaller pellet.

• Keep the safety on until it's time to shoot. Climbing over fences with a rifle that'll maybe go off if you drop it is a very bad idea: 11.5ftlbs on a pellet into an eye might very well kill you or your mate stone dead.

• Watch your background. Your pellet will not go half a mile - that's why you don't need a firearms certificate - but it will, if you miss, go straight through that nearby hedge. If you can't absolutely guarantee that there's no one on the other side then you should not be taking that shot. If you hit someone, or their dog, and hurt them, then you'll likely go to jail and you'll deserve it.

• Walk the land you have permission on; get to know it. Look for burrows; look for paths between burrows; figure out the distances from places you can hide and shoot to likely target areas. If you already know it's thirty yards to that burrow then you can reasonably expect, if you've zeroed at thirty, that you will be putting the pellets in the right place - otherwise you'll be estimating all the time and that takes a while to learn how to do well.

• Tread softly. Don't wear hob-nailed boots when you're out hunting: rabbits are very sensitive to vibration through the ground so wear light shoes and go easy.

• Don't cover yourself in eau de cologne before you go out. Rabbits have a very acute sense of smell. Don't chain-smoke while hunting, either - if you do, you won't be.

• You can camp or you can wander. Camping, settling down a useful distance from a place you expect rabbits to appear, will probably get you some rabbits - but you may need to earn it by sitting or lying silently for a long time - and there's no guarantee that one will appear. Wandering, walking the land in the hope of seeing a rabbit and approaching it by stealth, is much more interesting than camping, but 'interesting' in this context also means 'considerably more challenging'.

• If you're going to be camping and it's not high summer, dress very warmly: lie motionless on the ground when it's even mildly chilly and you'll soon freeze.

• If a rabbit pops out in front of you and sits on the edge of its burrow then you should not shoot at it. Rabbits need to be so far from their burrow that you can get to a wounded but still mobile rabbit quicker than it can get back to its burrow. This is important.

• If you can find a spot where you can watch down a burrow-riddled fence line, then that's good. If you can find a spot where you can look down two burrow-riddled fence lines then that's even better. Examine the intersection of fields: is there a little hidey-hole there you can use?

• If you're wandering, pay attention to the direction of the wind: there's little point walking towards an area that your scent will visit before you get there. Walk into the breeze if you can. Don't camp upwind of a burrow you have hopes for.

• Rabbits will not sit around while you approach them in plain sight - sad but true. It is possible, using all available cover from hedges, long grass, nettles, overhanging foliage or depressions in the grounds, to creep up on rabbits in daylight - but it is very, very difficult. Hold the rifle across the crooks of your elbows if you are crawling on all fours; advance when they are feeding or looking the other way and freeze if they look up. Don't try this in clothes you're not happy to get filthy because you will get filthy if you do it properly. Wear a hat. Don't be discouraged by numerous failures - it really is very difficult to do this and reading about it on the internet is not the same as learning how to do it.

• You should be aiming for the point where an imaginary line back from the rabbit's eye intersects with another imaginary line coming down from its ear. That's where its brain is; that's where you want the pellet to go.

• If you wound the animal and you are not sitting behind a multi-shot PCP with half-a-dozen pellets ready to go then you will need to get up quickly, get to it, grab it and dispatch it with the utmost haste. Take a sturdy trout priest with you or learn how to break a rabbit's neck (James Marchington demonstrates (to the Suburban Bushwacker) how to do this at the end of this video.)

• A dead rabbit will need to be - and this is, unfortunately, the correct term - 'thumbed' to clear the bladder of urine prior to gutting. You hold the rabbit by the front legs with your left hand (if you're right-handed), grab the animal around the stomach and, exerting pressure with your thumb, slide your hand down towards its tail; then you repeat the process till the job is done.

• Rabbits come with fleas. You may decide that hanging your catch on a fencepost for half an hour while they disperse is a good idea; you may equally decide to grit your teeth and get on with gutting the rabbit there and then.

• It's probably best to gut rabbits in the field. To do so, lay the animal on its back on the ground, pick up the fur just below the bottom of the ribcage and make a nick through the skin beneath. This done, insert the blade of your knife in the nick and, taking care not to slice through any of the revealed intestines (since this will risk tainting the meat), slice the belly open towards the back legs. Pick the rabbit up so that you're holding it with the front legs in your left hand and the back legs in your right and then - holding tightly - make an abrupt gesture away in front of you while turning slightly: the guts - all of them, if you're lucky - will fly out. You may have to tidy up with your knife afterwards. None of this is as pleasant as it sounds.

• Don't forget to clean your knife when you get home and don't risk cross-contamination by using the same knife for anything else food-related.

• Hey, you've got a rabbit for dinner! 

_________________________________________________________


Tags: Air rifles, air guns, shooting, fieldcraft, hunting, rabbits, shooting, stalking, hunting rabbits, how to, tips, rabbits, game

Why a .177 over a .22 for Hunting Rabbits?

Bpaul wrote in a comment recently:

I'd be curious on the numbers your gun is putting out if you get a chance to shoot it over a chrony.

Also, your decision to go .177 from .22 -- did you blog about that? Be curious to hear why...

Hi Bpaul,

I went for all this, basically, because the opportunity presented itself and the argument about the flatter trajectory of the .177 finally convinced me. With the roller-coaster trajectory of the .22 at 12ftlb there's the constant difficulty of trying to estimate where the pellet will be in its arc when it reaches its target point.

If you zero at 35 yards with a .22 there's a variation over, say, 40 yards of about three inches up and down through an imaginary line from the end of the scope to the target. The pellet starts two inches below this line, climbs up to about an inch above it and then immediately after 35 yards drops below it again in its downwards fall. So there's a three-inch margin for error depending on where the target is and constant adjustments up and down need to be made in the reticule to accommodate this while aiming. (The graphs below are from ChairGun Pro available free here.)

With the .177 at 12ftlbs however, the arc of the lighter pellet will stay within one inch from about 10 right the way out to about 40 yards (.177 RWS Superdomes weight only 8.3 grains against the 14.66 grains of .22 H&N Field Targets). So in theory that means that if you can judge that the rabbit is at a distance anywhere between 10 and 40 yards then you can be fairly confident that a shot at the intersection of the scope's cross-hairs will result in a pellet hitting the target area. If you compare the length of the different pink kill zones on the two graphs you can see that they do bear this out.

My distance estimation is not so great but even I can tell if a rabbit is between 10 and 40 yards; so purely on the basis of this there's a much stronger case for going with a .177 for fieldwork.

To get the pellets out at anything up close to 12ftlb a .177 needs a spring with a few more coils on it than one in a .22 - and you can feel the greater effort needed to cock the rifle now. (The rifle was of course chronographed before leaving the shop and it was doing a healthy and legal 11.78ftlbs with the RWS Superdomes I'm using.) I've heard it said from people commenting here that with this stronger spring the increased release vibration in a .177 would act against any gain that the flatter trajectory could provide. This did seem to make sense to me but (and I can only speak about my rifle, of course) thanks to Tony at Sandwell Field Sports, if anything the gun now fires with perceptibly less spring judder than it did before the work was done.

My damn cold is still hanging around so I suspect I won't be going out today to see if all this theory on paper translates into a greater incidence of rabbit on the table - but I'm hopeful for the future.

Cheers,

HH
_________________________________________________________

Tags: accuracy, 177, air rifles, pellet, sandwell field sports, shooting, Springer, hunting, trajectory

The big question: .177 or .22 for Rabbit Hunting?

177 or 22? That - a swift peek at any of the popular airgun forums will quickly assure you - is most certainly the question.

To cut to the chase, the answer's 177.

Why? Well: it seems to boil down to trajectory - the parabolic path that a hopefully rabbit-bound pellet describes after it leaves the barrel of a rifle. It does not go in a straight line, I learned to my surprise, and then drop when it's tired - it inscribes, instead, an arc 'twixt gun and rabbit. But if it does that, then it's not simply a question of 'point and shoot' at all; distance becomes a crucial factor. How can you predict where in its arc your pellet is going to be when it reaches the head of the rabbit that you wish to shoot? Because if it's an inch too high then it will miss, and if it's an inch too low, then it will miss again. Nightmare!

177 pellets have a much flatter trajectory in the 40-odd yards after they leave the rifle barrel than 22's do. It's as simple as that. You can arrange it - I gather - so that in the area, say, between 20 and 35 yards (the crucial area within which the vast majority of relatively humane air rifle shooting is going to be taking place) the pellet will deviate from an imaginary straight line drawn between the end of the barrel and the rabbit's brain by a matter of only so little as half an inch or so. A 22 pellet, on the other hand, will be drawing a line that looks like the path of an amusing roller-coaster ride.

This I learned after I blew all the cash I had to spare on a 22 rifle.

If you want to have a gander at some parabolas, head over to http://www.chairgun.com/ or to the ballistic reticle calculator (superb name!) at http://www.hawkeoptics.com/brc/index.php and download the free software.

[In my time machine I revisit this post to leave a link to the future where I will write more upon this topic and my decision to opt for .177: http://austeritygrub.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-177-for-hunting-rabbits.html ]

Air Rifle Shooting: Still learning how to zero, hold, breathe and fire...

Hunting a couple of times a week over the last eighteen months I've now got this shooting thing sorted, have I? I must have learned how to shoot by now, surely?

Well, no. Learning is still something I do every time I go out - as my session yesterday made clear.

A beautiful day. Out in the fields I plonked down against a fence and - soothed all the while by the pastoral music of the M6 motorway directly behind me - popped fifty-odd shots thirty yards across a field into little A5 paper targets I'd pinned to the base of a tree. I'd scrawled a series of biro circles on the paper, all roughly an inch in diameter.

My first effort appalled me: a ragged, two-and-a-half inch spattering, low and to the right, with flyers out to four inches. A thoroughly miserable group. Clearly my zero had drifted but I was still all over the place in terms of group coherence.

I took off the scope adjustment covers and gave it two clicks left and two clicks up. This is lazy of me - it's better to do the horizontal and vertical adjustments separately but it's just not the way my head works.


Well, O.K. That's a little better. Slightly tighter, somewhat closer.

As I carried on shooting I began to become more aware of how I was holding the rifle and how I was breathing when I let go of the shot. My instinct is to hold the gun tightly - left and right hand both - hold my breath at the point that I fire and use the whole fleshy pad of my index finger to pull back on the trigger. For me that's natural, it's instinctive - but it's all wrong. Tony at the Penkridge Air Rifle Club has several times said to me, 'You've gone blue, lad!' when I finally drew in a great whooping breath after a rigidly tense and airless ten seconds of trying to get a shot off.

I began to make the effort to keep the cycle of my breathing regular as I watched the cross hairs rise and fall on the target - trying to pull the trigger in the pause between my breaths rather than manufacturing a longer interval by ceasing to breath at all. Things started to get better.

Another two clicks up. Another two clicks left.

I began to think about my grip on the rifle and the way I squeezed the trigger. I've learned that it's vital to let springers rest on your hands and move freely when you fire them - fighting the recoil by holding tight only makes things worse. So I tried to pay attention to how I was holding the gun. When I'm firing groups the idea 'God, I'm a lousy shot! Gotta get better!' usually ends up making me hang on for grim death, tense as hell. So with each shot now I tried to loosen my mortice-like grip on the stock and relax while I fired.

Once again, the group got a little better. Two more clicks up; two more to the left.

Tony has also mentioned trigger-finger placement to me at the club, 'Just use the tip of your finger,' he'd said, 'right at the base of the trigger - that's all you need.' So each shot I took I tried to notice how I was touching the trigger. 'Rekord' triggers on Weirhauch rifles are famed for their sensitivity - they really do repay your attention and the less force you exert on the trigger, the less you make the gun wobble when you shoot. The less it wobbles, the more accurate the shot.

Still a little bit shy of the centre mark, I gave the scope adjusters one click up and one click left. Then - relaxed as I could get, holding the rifle loosely, breathing evenly and using only the tippy-top of my finger on the end of the trigger - I fired off five shots.


Whoa! A heaven-sent group, a thing of beauty! You'd better stop shooting right now, I thought, and get your camera out before you put a flyer in there and mess up the pretty picture...

Zeroing Air Rifles: Festival of Missing Things

I was reading a thread on an air gun forum last night about shooting with pre-charged pneumatics (here) and so I went to sleep thinking - well, among other things, sure - about accuracy in the field. The folk in the thread are discussing the pellet-on-pellet performance that can or can't be expected from an out-of-the-box Weihrauch HW100 - and in terms of what they wrote and how it compares with the sort of thing that I can produce with my old springer, well, I might just as well attempt to hone the rabbit-stopping properties of my critical thinking as attempt to match the precision of these things (I quote):

"At 30 yards once you've found the the right pellet it should be 1 single hole."

[At 30 yards] "You should be getting ragged one hole groups at that distance."

"Both me and a mate was out the other evening perfect conditions, he too shoots a HW100KT and he shot a rabbit at 51 yds bisley magnum, and I shot one at 54 yds logan penetrator. Both shots were premeasured with laser rangefinder both perfect head shots instant kills. Neither of us are annie oakley but these rifles are deadly accurate if running as they should."

The image at the top of this post is my last zeroing effort a few days ago with my, as ever, boingy old HW80k. I'd taken about three shots the day before - thirty-yard shots, all - and missed every time. So in something of a funk, since I'd zero'd about two days before this, I went and fired off the first group (top left in the photo) from an unsupported sitting position at thirty yards (with H&N field target pellets).

And yes, the group showed that I was, indeed, out. So I dialled it up two clicks and fired off another set (top right). O.K, a little too high this time, so I took it one click down and fired off the third group (bottom left).

Well, O.K. That'll do, I thought. The last group did show a little bit of a left drift, but that could just have been the wind perhaps. The first two groups weren't to the left so I didn't adjust on the basis of the last one being a bit skewiff left-wise.

I certainly do wish that I could dependably hit a rabbit at 54 yards - but it would be crazy for me to even try. Twenty to thirty is about my limit and - even then - I miss a good deal.

Sometimes, when faced with an ideal like this against which I can judge myself, I can tend to think, 'ah, gawd, I shouldn't even be out shooting if this is the best I can do'.

I suppose that what I then do is remind myself that I'm not going out shooting in order to try and win any accuracy competitions, I'm actually going out because I want to try and get my dinner.

It's also becoming clearer to me that if I think that zeroing is something I need to do every couple of weeks, say, then I'm kidding myself; I ought to be doing it more or less every time I go out hunting.
_________________________________________________________

Tags: Weirhauch, zeroing, air rifles, zeroing, hunting, rabbits, shooting

Hit and Miss - PCP versus Springers

There's a discussion over on the Airgunbbs forum (here) at the moment about PCP's versus Springers - and, as is often the case, it's a very interesting one: pro's and con's all over the place. My ha'penneth worth amounts to little beyond, 'Well, I've got a springer and I've not got a PCP, nor, for that matter, the readies to buy one with'; so while all this is interesting, for me it's a little academic. If Bill Gates were to browse this blog and, overcome with philanthropy perhaps, he decided to deposit a large sum via the Paypal button to the left, then that might well change: I'd buy myself a Daystate Airwolf quicker than you could say "Daystate Airwolf". At the moment though, I'm still lugging the mighty HW80k around and, while I'm certainly managing to miss things with it, I'm definitely developing my upper body strength (since it weighs a ton).

Today I went back to the same part of the field where, the day before yesterday, I'd had such unexpected luck. I camped down in the grass at exactly the spot where I'd got the last rabbit and waited. A mere ten minutes later one popped out and, after taking careful aim, I missed it completely. Remarkably, the rabbit didn't leg it (this may well be a testimony to the efficacy of the Weihrauch moderator I've got stuck on the end of the rifle: this does increase the length of the gun to the extent where I may be mistaken for a pole-vaulter when making for the fields but it does, also, seem to do a good job in reducing the crack from the shot). I broke the barrel to put another pellet in, however, and this did manage to frighten off the rabbit.

I lay there for another twenty minutes and got bored enough to check my emails via my phone (all the time thinking, 'Ye Gods, this is a ridiculous thing to be doing while lying in a field'). I saw a rabbit emerge at the end of the field, about forty-five yards away, but it quickly scarpered. I decided to crawl up the field a way so I'd be handy if it reappeared and I'd just settled down there when two rabbits came running out of the bushes - they sat for a moment at forty yards and then set off to run again. I thought that they would run away from me, but no, they ran straight towards me and then stopped at about twenty-five yards. I took a shot at the nearest one and it went down at once without so much as a twitch.

Taking a look at it, I noticed that I'd managed - more by luck than design - an almost textbook-perfect head shot. I've tended to think that shots of this kind are the preserve of supremely clinical pre-charged pneumatics only; in truth, I do tend to think that much of the talk on forums about hair-splitting accuracy tends to come from people that are able to shell out for a PCP and this can, I think, give those who can't afford one of these things a misleading view of what to expect from their humble springer. But this shot - forgive my immodesty - was, I think, a pretty good one.

Acting on a - for me - most unusual charitable impulse, I gave the rabbit to a neighbour. They were chuffed - and I was chuffed meself at how chuffed they were.
__________________________________________________________

Tags: accuracy, air rifles, hunting, HW80, HW80k, pre-charged pneumatic, Springer, stalking, rabbits

Zeroing the HW80k: Experiences with Groups

Concerned that I might be shooting off the mark, I went out yesterday and did a bit of re-zeroing. The first shot I put into the target (the uppermost one) was perfectly on the intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines - God, I thought, that's astounding! The rest of the group, however, was more dispersed - that's groups for you.

After going up and looking at the overall position of the pellets, I decided that the average of their positions was falling somewhat low. I went back 30 yards to the shooting spot, uncapped the top scope adjustment cap and tried to figure out how many clicks meant a movement of about half an inch up at thirty yards. After failing to remember anything that might help me to work it out, I made a guess instead: five clicks 'Up', then. I shot off another group of six (the lower picture above). There were no astonishing and misleading bulls-eyes this time, but, instead, the group had indeed moved up so that the group of shots more accurately surrounded the bulls-eye than it did before.

I spent a little time after this trying to see if there was a lot of difference between the zero point of the RWS Superdomes that I've been using over the last month or so and the rest of the tin of H&N Field Target Trophy's that I'd used before this. I also threw a group in with Air Arms Diabolo Fields to see what that could tell me. And what did I learn? I learned that trying to do this sort of thing in a hurry and draw conclusions from hastily thrown off groups is a bad idea. It'd take, I decided - at least with my shooting, anyway - a procession of groups with each of the different pellets before anything could be properly learned - and I didn't have the time to do that yesterday. So I learned that if I do want to learn stuff then I have to allocate proper amounts of time for learning - and not hope to get rich (with knowledge) quick.

Hunting accuracy in the field - Ideals & Reality

Crouching in fields, freezing, over the last few months - trying not to fog the eyepiece of my scope up with my breath, trying to keep some feeling in my trigger finger - I found myself thinking a good deal about accuracy.

I'm new to this game: I got my first air gun in late Autumn last year and, in total since then, I've shot six rabbits only.

I've come to this, and have been learning how to do it, almost entirely via this medium called "The Internet". I went along to a gun club one time and a field target shoot another time and I had some good conversations with very friendly and helpful people at both of these places. But, since I wanted to shoot and eat rabbits, not hit tiny metal targets at challenging distances nor fire on a 25 yard indoor range, I have - unwisely perhaps - spent much the time that I haven't spent in fields reading things that people have written on the net about hunting rabbits.

And a large part of that was concerned with accuracy: "Never take a shot until you can absolutely guarantee that it will pass through the brain of the rabbit and turn that animal off like you would turn off a light" - was the impression I got from reading the forums. "Any other shot, any failure to instantly and painlessly transfer this animal from the state of being alive to the state of being dead is inhumane and has no place in our sport" - this was, more or less, the message I absorbed from what was written there.

And, while I was reading, I was doing my target practise and getting better at grouping and changing guns and trying to find one that had the power to do the job and doing more target practise. And then I started trying to hunt rabbits in the field.

The first rabbit I shot was a 'perfect' head shot at 25 to 30 yards; it jumped straight up into the air about three feet and when it hit the ground again it was stone dead - and this was just like I'd read in the forums: on/off.

But the rest of them, to be honest, haven't really been like that. I haven't been able to convince myself that my shooting has been operating at the level of clinical precision that seems to be, if I judge the matter by the standards upheld in the writing on the forums, the only humane and acceptable way of doing the job - the job of getting rabbits to put in the cook pot.

And I've sat in fields, , freezing and staring at hedgerows - and I've thought a good deal about this.

And it comes down to accuracy, I've decided. But not accuracy that's merely on the level of "Can you put five shots at thirty-five yards through the hole in the middle of a Polo Mint?" (to which the answer is, of course, simply, 'no') but rather the question of seeking for a greater and greater accuracy not only in shooting but also in finding the words to accurately and honestly describe what goes on when I'm out shooting. Since I've started to write this blog I've noticed that there's a real pressure - a pressure from within myself, mainly - to push what is pictured in my writing towards an ideal that is, in truth, quite remote from what is actual in my shooting.

I tap away at the keyboard and I'm very much aware of an imaginary, judgemental gaze looking at me, looking at what I've written, and sternly pointing out to me just how far that deviates from the ideal which I understand - from reading the forums - to be the only thing that's acceptable. So I conform to this pressure and write in such a way that I join in and thereby allow my aim, as it were, to drift. My initial aim of accurately describing what goes on in the field drifts, then, towards the different aim-point of acceptably describing what goes on in the field - and there's a gap, a distance, between what's actual and what's acceptable.

Does this matter?

I suppose that it does matter if this 'ideal' becomes a tyrant: if I, or we, can tolerate nothing that isn't this pristine ideal then life, I think, will become a very sterile thing indeed; it will become very un-life-like.

I watched a video on the net the other day about dog shit; a borough council official was saying to camera, "Obviously, we're responsible for the safety of the citizens in our community - it's our job to look after them. If just one child were to become blind as a result of catching a disease from dog mess that they'd come into contact with on a piece of common land in the Borough, well then, we - the members of the Borough Council - would be personally responsible for that child's blindness! So it's very clear to us that our legislation banning the exercise of dogs on the common is very much in the public interest and - despite the protests of dog-owners - will go ahead as planned".

Here, I thought, was a instance of the ideal (and it's a worthy one, of course) completely dictating what could actually - legally and practically - happen on a piece of public land. The gap was closed: no dogs, no shit, no discussion, no actual, just the ideal, and thank you very much.

The ideal thing, as regards shooting rabbits for the pot with an air rifle, would perhaps be if everyone ate only soy beans, no one owned an air rifle and rabbits were re-named 'hedge kittens'.

I'd like, somehow, to try to remember myself that not only is there a permanent and irresolvable gap - always and forever - between the ideal and the actual, but also that there's a value, a great value, in publicly admitting that this really is the case. Because I just can't accept that the Good Life - this thing that we're all looking for - does really consist in the extermination of our actual lives. That accurate, I just don't want to be.