And there you have it: according to the Federation of Conservationist Hunters & Trappers, the best way to regulate hunting is to de-regulate it, a sort of Big Bang for bangers.

This is because, always according to these luminaries of logical thought and legal philosophy, during the first two days of the hunting season, no illegalities have been reported, apparently because of the presence of so many "legal hunters" in the field.

Don't blame me if on reading this you feel yourself plummeting through the looking glass, it's not me saying it, it's the bird-killers and trappers, the ones whose own name, Conservationist Hunters, belies their philosophy and in its inherent oxymoronic nature shows them for what they really are.

There are echoes, in the latest pronouncement by the hunters, of the "legalise drugs and make the world a better place" arguments that propose legalising narcotics in order to remove drug barons from the equation. The only reason that argument has any merit is that there is so much profit in trafficking narcotics thst removing the temptation might achieve something, in the case of hunting, no-one traffics in it, unless there's a market for carcasses to stuff, so there's no merit there.

And it would be nice if we had less arrogance implicit in the hunters' statements all the time: "we urge the Police to do their duty" and "we will take disciplinary action" and "we demand..." are the type of thing that men with guns probably think are fine-sounding and heroic.

The rest of us, guys, just see you for what you are.

I suppose the next step for the hunters will be for them to demand d disbanding of Birdlife and its replacement with a group of people more sympathetic to the one, true, religion, bird slaughter. Oh, sorry, I forgot, they've already made a move in this direction, calling for Birdlife to be removed from existent consultative organs and replaced by real bird-lovers.

One assumes they mean bird-lovers in the same sense as they mean "Conservationist Hunters", you'd have to think.

Just ban the whole lot of them from walking amongst us, I say, knowing full well that a Government that appoints a representative of fireworks manufacturers to draw up the rules of fireworks manufacture will do no such thing.