Game Shooting
Driven Game 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 out 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.
Rough Shooting
This is the 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. These dogs also retrieve the shot game. Should the quarry be wounded, the sportsman will retrieve and despatch it quickly and humanely.
Virtually all the quarry species listed can be walked-up (i.e. where the shooter flushes out the quarry as he or she walks through cover). The countryside 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.
