My name is George, I'm 42 & I dispute that some other folks here are married to the greatest wife in the world as I'm sure I am! She is pregnant with our first child (a girl) & I am really lucky to have her in my life.
I was born & raised in England & my father introduced me to hunting early on, think about 8 years old when he let me shoot his treasured BSA .22 Hornet at a rock. I still own the rifle & treasure it as much as he did. In the UK, all hunting is on private property & all game on the land belongs to the owner of the property. There is no such thing as Game & Fish or DOW over there. Also no tags, no bag limits & seasons are very liberal indeed. You can easily own suppressors, hunt predators or rabbits at night with lights, sell game animals & basically have a good old time.
Only problems are that the UK has turned into a socialist paradise & the gun control laws are pretty tough.
My father was a part-time gamekeeper for an estate with around 350 acres, sounds small don't it? Well, small is beautiful & we used to kill at least 400 rabbits a year off the place. The role of the gamekeeper is to keep the vermin (foxes, crows, magpies, jays & any other egg stealing predators) under control while maximizing the environment for game birds. (pheasants mainly but also partridges, ducks, snipe, teal & woodcock)We reared & released a couple hundred pheasants into the woods every year, feeding & watering them, keeping the predators from feasting by trapping & calling them.
The biggest lesson I learned during all this was that, given predators in the area, if you get out calling, it becomes a battle with the law of averages. Seems the more I got out calling, the luckier I got at getting them coming in to me.
The purpose of releasing the pheasants, predator control etc was to ensure that the owner had enough birds so that he could invite his buddies over to shoot on his land & they would do the same on their places. We used to drive the pheasants to the shooters who numbered about 8 to 10 guys. They would line up in a horseshoe around the ends of the wood where the pheasants would hide & we'd beat the bushes (hence why this activity is known as bush beating & the people as 'beaters') to get the pheasants flying over the 'guns' as they are known.
Many places in the UK do this very commercially & if you have enough money, between you & 8 other folks, you can shoot over a 1000 pheasants a DAY if you choose too. Very, very different to the USA for sure & having grown up with this kind of hunting, it makes me cringe sometimes when I see pheasants shot at really close ranges when flying away from the shooters. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
My dad never hunted anything bigger than hares so deer hunting etc was a mystery to me until I was in the British Army & got invited to one of the officer's estates in Scotland to cull some red deer hinds (does) for free. Had a blast, met a whole bunch of good folks & that got me into deer hunting in a big way. Used to travel to Scotland regularly after that & ended up getting on the cull team for several estates up there. When I say "estates" I mean places with thousands & thousands of acres to play with. The red deer needed thinning out, especially the hinds as the stags were reserved for the paying guests in the summer.
I probably killed over 450 deer during the culls, not bragging but just using that as an indicator as to how many animals there are in the UK. Game is very plentiful & I do miss the hunting opportunities I had there.
I moved to the USA about 6 years ago & love it here too! I have my own manufacturer's & importer's FFL & can own firearms here that I could only dream about in the UK. I love calling coyotes, shooting prairie dogs & traveling around the US hunting.
Got a few projects for coyote guns on the go right now & they offer some real promise for those dogs that hang up 'out there'. More when I have something solid to report.
Here's a couple of pics; the first is from 3 years ago in CO, killed an elk at a massive (!) 47 yards with my 6.8SPC AR & the next is in WY this year with doe antelope killed at 130 yards with the kind of L1A1 rifle I carried in the British Army.
Thanks for the great forum & look forward to being a part of it, George.