My chuckle amid the bloody gunfire.

General Brrrk von Flappalot, demonstrating the latest techniques in Pheasant camouflage.
If you are having difficulty seeing him try turning your head on one side and squeezing your earlobes tightly in a Vegan Nerve-Pinch.

This is huntin' shootin' fishin' territory. Most of us don't live in caves anymore but an awful lot of people still behave as though they do.

The only wood around here where animals aren't ritually slaughtered by gentlemen with large guns, stuffed wallets and tiny ... triggers ... is the Owl Wood.

Every other patch of woodland around here resounds daily to bullet, shot, bludgeon and occasionally what we have decided can only be an elephant gun. Speculation as to why anyone around here needs an elephant gun ranges from rogue Lincolnshire elephants to extreme trouser-contents insecurity. Bear in mind that we have had a wallaby bounce up the driveway though and that at the first sign of elephant poop on the verges I am quite prepared to believe that Colonel Hathi and family are on the run (and the best of luck to them).

Every Thursday a lot of big, brave, chaps gather together with caterin' and seatin' and scruffy oiks to do the complicated stuff like loadin' and re-loadin' for them. They employ fiscally ill-adapted peasants to drive the wildlife towards them for an apparently leg-wobblingly, knee-tremblingly exciting bloodbath. I believe that it is not unknown for a young lad to be employed and given a stick with which to gently ease a, shall we say, less than sparklingly bright shooter's gunbarrel into roughly the right direction. I don't think much of these big, brave, chaps, as you may have gathered. I'd be more inclined to be impressed if they ever hunted anything that had a cat in hell's chance of fighting back.

I have written to my Member of Parliament (surely a limp Membrum virilis labouring under the yoke of an extra "Hooray" gene if ever there was one), suggesting that support from the more cerebrally-developed, less Hooray-enabled public for hunting with dogs and shooting un-armed birds would skyrocket - if only he introduced legislation ensuring that the various Hunts and Shoots hunted and shot only each other.

You know the sort of thing - put the Seventeenth Louth & District Land-Owner's Fnarr Fnarr Lancers on one side of a convenient copse, bus in the Peterborough Pheasant Annihilation League of Tweeded Ladies to the other, and then blow a whistle. Let them blast away at each other until they're all ecstatically happy. Schedule in a few breaks for the St John's Ambulance people to go in with side-arms and deliver the coup de grace to any bloodsportspersons who may only have been winged, call in a variety of mobile salad bars for caterin' to the spectators and there you have it. What could be nicer?

Well, possibly the Grimsby Nunsthorpe Housing Estate Hunt, resplendent in their pinks, surrounded by their hounds and racing after the heady scent of the Brocklesby Hunt with a view to letting the hounds make a(nother) accidental "they're only vermin" success (possibly tragically, possibly, although not in my book, mistakenly, of the Earl of Yarborough) under the terms of the exemptions of the Hunting Act 2004. Who could argue that two Hunts huntin' each other would be double the spectacle, double the fun? Plus only those who enjoy bloodsports would thus be involved, the animals could sit it out without worrying that they are ruining anyone's day.

I have outlined plans for combining Hunts with Shoots in busy tourist areas. I intend to add on a sack or egg & spoon race for the local sitting Members of Parliament - first MP across no-man's land gets two un-audited non-receipt expense claims or something as a prize. Mr Tapsell MP seemed surprisingly lukewarm on the matter. I suspect that he remains unconvinced that sufficient of the public would be interested in seeing hobbled MPs racing each other for undue financial reward while under conditions of enthusiastic but amateur live gunfire and while surrounded by un-fed huntin' hounds safely directed and carefully controlled by an apoplectic caveman on 'orseback blowin' an infallible "hound-control" horn.

Personally, I think it would make splendid prime-time television viewing with the possibility of going global.

Anyway, the ruddy point! While out walking I was listening to the rapid - almost rabidly rapid - sounds of gunfire echoing from every copse I passed (with my head carefully down) and it got me to chuckling. Not your usual reaction to gunfire, I grant you, but I shall explain. I do a lot of chuckling while I'm walking. It discourages folk from the village who may offer me a lift and it prevents strangers from asking directions (they tend to just move on, especially if I do that thing with my eyes, looking in two different directions at the same time). So. Chuckling. Why?

Well, what if the gunfire I could hear were not a one-sided slaughter of frostbitten fowl and rheumy-eyed rabbits being blasted out of their wicker bathchairs, but the sound of a more balanced and fair military skirmish?

Have I spent these years supporting the wrong kind of action? Might we huggy-wuggy animal-loving wusses not take a leaf out of the foreign policies and strategies of the United States of America and of that horrible accidental political construct; the United Kingdom? Instead of thanklessly trying to persuade the great white big brave hunters not to hunt - why not just do what the UK and USA have always done internationally and arm the locals? Supply weapons and training to the Pheasant Freedom Fighters, help the Rabbit Taliban hone their hand-grenade delivery skills, drop gas masks into badger strongholds by airlift? Level the "playing" field a little, so to speak?

I spent the rest of my walk imagining the fierce guerilla battles going on in the wooded undergrowth and felt some slight optimism at the notion that at least every other gunshot boom or ricochet whine that split the hedgerows beside me had originated from something with claws or paws, fur or feathers and a "Rambo" bandana, fighting for its life. Abandoning a rabbit warren here to gain some tactical advantage, brave escapades to save Pheasant Ryan, hunters crawling through the bracken only to come nose to nose with the knees of some heavily-armed Colonel Hathi fox ...

In international politics yesterday's terrorist group becomes today's freedom fighter and before they know it tomorrow's cause for surreptitious regime change. Mayhap we can make yesterday's roast dinner into today's popular cause célèbre and tomorrow's independent fellow living creature?

I have to get my brain off its soggy gluteus maximus and finish January's edition of the Owl Wood Publications - so that I can move on to the Gunfight at the Aby Corral, featuring the Magnificent Seven, or something. The day the pheasants and the rabbits cried enough, tied shemaghs across to hide their faces, held their Kalashnikovs overhead and ululated ...

Vermin control my Arsenal Villa are doing awfully well this year, don't you think?