Game handling advice
One of the Code of Good Shooting Practice’s five golden rules is that game is food and must always be treated as such.
Types of game shooting
Rough shooting / walked up
This is most common method of live quarry shooting. Shooters use their trained dogs (usually spaniels or Labradors) to flush game out of the hedgerows, woods or other cover as they walk along.
The knowledge and hunting skills required plus the fresh air, exercise and the training and working of specially bred dogs makes rough shooting one of the most popular, rewarding and cheapest forms of live quarry shooting in the UK.
These dogs also retrieve the shot game and the shooters despatch it quickly and humanely if needed.
Numbers are usually totally irrelevant with rough shooting, it’s about being out in the countryside with your dog and hopefully bagging something for the pot.
Driven shooting
This form of shooting is much more formal than simply walking with your dog alongside the hedgerows and is usually confined to pheasant, partridge and grouse shooting.
On the shoot day, a team of shooters, or Guns, line up at numbered pegs. Meanwhile, under the gamekeeper’s instructions, a group of beaters and their dogs move through areas of woodland or covert, flushing the game ahead of them.
The aim is to get the birds to break cover and fly high over the line of Guns to provide sporting shots. Shot game is retrieved quickly by a picker-up who sends his/her trained gundog to where the shot game falls.
Because of the organisation and number of people involved in a shoot of this sort, the cost to the Guns is considerably higher than in the other types of shooting.
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Beating
Beaters are there to flush out the birds into the path of the Guns, so they have something to shoot and they are an essential part of any shoot day.
Shooting seasons
It is your responsibility to know what you can and can’t shoot, and when, so make sure you bookmark this quarry season page.
