Hunting, Shooting, Fishing—and Conservation?

Abstract

Hughes wrote about hunting, fishing and shooting in some of his earliest surviving poems, and his collected poems frequently mention killing game and vermin. The contradictions in Hughes’s accounts of fishing are well known (Gifford 1999), but this chapter analyses his often contradictory reasons for supporting hunting. Hughes largely stopped shooting game after Plath was horrified by his killing of a sick grouse in 1956 — but on at least two occasions afterwards, he shot game birds and spoke of each shoot as his first since that incident. He wrote of his support of hunting foxes and stags with dogs in an article of 1997, because he thought that life would be worse for the animals if they were not hunted. He himself went stag shooting with Prince Charles in 1995, but in an interview given in 1998, he declared that his desire to shoot animals had diminished in his later life. His environmental activities from 1994 until his death are distinctive because he attempted to formulate his defence of blood sports on conservationist grounds. This chapter explores his conflicting views on hunting and shooting, while revealing new insights into his late environmentalist activities, such as his patronage of wildlife charities and his contribution to a public inquiry about the driftnetting of salmon in 1997.