George Walford: Cui Bono?

Observing the way foxes, grouse and cattle flourish IC has already suggested that the way to ensure the preservation of species in danger would be to enlist the influence of the people who hunt for sport. Not for the first time, we were behind the facts.

John M. Mackenzie has published The Empire of Nature: Hunting, conservation and British imperialism. (Manchester U.P.). He shows how the late Victorian and Edwardian white hunters, acting in the colonies as the Norman invaders had earlier acted in Britain, used the powers of government to set up game parks, large areas for the exclusive use of white hunters and tourists, indigenous subsistence-hunters being excluded. (TLS April 28). (“Indigenous subsistence-hunters” was, of course, an earlier title for those increasingly coming to be known as poachers).

from Ideological Commentary 43, January 1990.