First Ride of '22

A lovely sunny day and not as cold as yesterday... ok, time to get the girl good and dirty... because there's nothing better than a dirty girl, right?

I took Morrigan up the A38, over the Severn at Gloucester and down the twisty windies to Tintern, via the Kymin and the Wye valley. The only bit of motorway was the old Severn Bridge, and it was a lovely eighty or so miles before lunch. Eighty feels the perfect distance for a non-stop loop now.

The A38 up around Newport (Glos, not Wales) was for the best part of a mile strewn with pheasant corpses; casualties of the passing traffic. I counted twenty seven and there were doubtlessly more I didn't see. Apart from the simple carnage and loss of life each one will have been a costly smash into a windscreen or car wing, and gods forfend it might be a motorcycle...

No doubt some landowner will claim it's an acceptable loss and he has several hundred more for the shooting... Funny thing, game birds... the law flip flops depending on how you feel at the time. If you're breeding them for the shoot they're livestock and you can kill the competing wildlife that predate them. You obviously aren't allowed to shoot livestock for fun...

Then, when you release them they're deemed to be wildlife, so you can shoot them. After the shooting season is finished and you round them up for breeding they become livestock again. Oh, but wait, if one of those pheasants that have been raised as livestock and then released, hits a car and causes an accident... oh, it's wildlife and the farmer isn't liable.

Like most of our legal system, law is written that enables and protects the landowners. It goes back to the robber barons and 'William the bastard'.