Shooting UK: Rockland Wildfowlers Online Auction

Thank you for you encouragement & support. We have just about recovered from the trauma - all in all it was a great success and we have learnt a great deal from the process. I was just checking the web stats and noticed the number of links generated from these threads and it triggered me to revisit them and catch up on any replies.

The Ducks Unlimited question is an interesting one. Locally I think many wildfowlers have become complacent due to the freedoms experienced in the past.

Wildfowling seemed to have stayed well under the fanatic's and conservation fascist's radar. However the political aspirations of national conservation "charities", bouyed up by their success in manipulative lobbying against wildfowling of banckrupt (both in terms of finance & knowledge) governement departments and QUANGOs (QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation) means they are now a force to be reckoned with.

The dificulty is that most wildfowlers it seems to me fiercely defend their independence and this would seem to blind them to the active participation with a pooled counter force. Some national bodies purport to be figting for the wildowler, but there would appear to be too many "failures" for this to raise the confidence of the shooter on the marsh. This apathy is our greatest weakness and is being exploited to the full. Conservationists are riding the wave of the fox hunting Bill and crass ignorance of urban "Disney Countryside Lovers".

I fear that it falls to individual clubs (of which there are many in the UK) to make their own arrangements and buy their own shooting grounds. True there is some help from sympathetic coservation bodies eg the WHT, however rising land prices to ridiculous levels (£4,000+ an acre for grazing marsh) means that commercial loans for small clubs are becoming very high and dificult to support on the limited funds received from low membership. None of this holds any water of course if political opinion is swayed by the ignorant and we are prevented from shooting our own lands by un-elected bodies on the grounds of conservation and preserving the delicate sensibilities of urban dog walkers in the countryside...

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