Gold Medal from Galloway

mudman

Well-Known Member
I read in the Shooting Times trophy review that a gold medal boar was shot near Casle Douglas, Galloway.

Is this not the location of the infamous Carminnows?
 
So adding two and two together, there is a possibility that the gold medal listed is the result of effectively a 'canned hunt'?
 
unfortunately Mudman you may be right
but a medal is a medal which ever way it is sort
Park deer also can be classed as a canned hunt in many folks mind, and thats where lots of the trophys across the uk and the world often come from
except on most occassions you may hav to hunt for your trophy ,other places i hav heard about, your trophy is walked towards you so you can get a telling shot in
but money is money
and that seems to be the driving force in these such cases
 
The following is an article published earlier last year so it will give you a good idea of what to expect when in that area - Castle Douglas/Carminnows!!

From The Sunday TimesJanuary 27, 2008

The boar gets it as big guns return Daniel Foggo
BIG-GAME hunting has returned to Britain with gunmen paying £550 apiece to shoot captive wild boar on a country estate.
At two recent trial drives, 20 “hunters” killed a total of 51 wild boar. The owner of the estate now plans to hold regular commercial shoots. Enthusiasts predict that it will become a main-stream sport within the next few years as boar stocks grow.
However, antihunting campaigners are likely to target the sport, and the proprietor of Britain’s first commercial boar hunt will not advertise it publicly. He relies on word of mouth to attract customers.
In the two trial drives the animals were herded through woodland by men and dogs towards a line of shooters armed with large-calibre rifles - a minimum calibre of 0.270 is recommended.
Both drives took place at a secret location in Scotland within the past few weeks.
The boar are kept within a 200-acre enclosure with an electric fence and the carcasses are sold by the estate for meat.
“It is an adrenaline high as a 16-stone boar charges at you through the undergrowth,” said Dave Corner, a hunter who helped organise the drives. “But it is not without its dangers. Often the dogs used will be killed and the people can be badly hurt, too.”
Groups opposed to hunting were horrified at the development. A spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports said: “It beggars belief that people actually get pleasure out of the mass slaughter of animals. Anyone participating in this kind of institutionalised killing has to be sick.”
And a spokeswoman for the Born Free Foundation said that flushing the boar would cause “confusion and panic” in the animals. “It is inhumane to treat wild or farm animals in this fashion,” she stated.
Wild boar became extinct in Britain 300 years ago but the number at large has grown rapidly in recent years because escaped and released animals from farms have bred and established populations from Kent to well north of the Scottish border.
Charlie Jacoby, who was the launch editor of Sporting Rifle magazine, estimated Britain’s population of wild boar at between 5,000 and 10,000. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will soon announce the results of a review into whether they should be subject to regulation and their killing licensed.
Farmers and landowners complain that the animals, omnivores with voracious appetites, destroy meadows and arable crops with their constant rooting and grubbing. They consider them a pest.
Jacoby said: “Wild boar and pheasant are pretty incompatible because the pigs destroy the land and the eggs and nests of the birds.”
The species is not classed as indigenous, so landowners can legally kill boar on their property. So far, however, they have been shot only singly or in small numbers by individual hunters working from hides at night.
Drives, which are a common hunting technique in mainland Europe, can lead to much larger kills.
The boars often turn and savage the dogs, sometimes killing them. With large males weighing 30 stone or more, armed with sharp tusks up to 6in long, they are dangerous to people too, although they usually attack only when threatened.
The drives in Scotland took place on December 28, when 18 boar were killed, and January 5, when 33 were killed, in the Dumfries and Galloway region. The Sunday Times has agreed not to identify the location.
Corner, who has attended drives in Germany and wanted to bring the concept to Britain, said: “We used about half a dozen beaters and between six and 12 dogs. One of the terriers seemed to take an instant dislike to wild boar. He was practically hanging off the tail of one of them.”
A line of men and dogs drove the boar through the woods to where rifle-men were positioned on 4ft “stands” to give them a superior firing line.
The largest boar to be shot weighed more than 25 stone. “One chap shot 10 of them and said he could have had 30 more,” Corner said. “We have all sorts of people taking part, from car mechanics and builders to multi-millionaires. They are bored with pheasant shooting and are looking for something different.”
Corner, who often shoots on the estate, said that there were also large populations of boar outside the enclosed shooting area. In future the drives may be held outside the barbed wire and electric fence.
Although the wild boar are considered pests, Corner said, they are fed to keep them from uprooting pasture and to foster the population for shoots.
The Hunting Act 2004 forbids the use of more than two dogs to flush out quarry. Corner said that no more than a couple of dogs were off the leash at any one time.
“In Germany they put the dogs in Kevlar vests to try to protect them from the boars’ tusks but every time I’ve been there I’ve seen dogs die on the boar drives.”
 
I think that no park bred animal should be judged or given a medal :evil: .
The prat who thinks he is introduceing driven boar into the Uk sounds like he is just making money from a bunch of suckers.
I'm sure that in the future there will be a population of boar in the UK that is big enough for boar drives. But the UK ain't Poland,Germany or Sweden
Boar are a new species here and the hunting powers that be are still working on the Swedish model for hunting boar to suit the Swedish hunting tradition.
Perhaps the UK will have there own hunting model to suit the UK hunting tradition and conditions.
 
Well none of this suprises me :rolleyes: this estate has had so much bad press over the years its become a bit of a joke in the shooting world.

Whether its a gold medal or not it was feeding out of a bucket about an hour before it was shot.

I can understand Stones comment, but do not entirley agree with it. Deer in a deer park have to be culled, and yes some big trophies are taken, but people as a rule do not make a secret of the fact that its a fenced estate.

The estate in question on the other hand has been shouting about how it will conduct driven Boar hunting in the UK. And for anyone to announce that they have taken the new British record Wild Boar, well who do they think they are kidding!!!! ONLY THEMSELVES I would say, and if they are stupid enough to believe it then they are fools.

It gives the whole sport of big game hunting/ stalking, call it what you will a bad name and bad press. :evil: :evil:

This estate I believe is broken up into 4 areas all with high fences. I believe you can shoot Soay Sheep as well (ohh that must be really demanding)

EMCc did you ever get any response from PC about your Boar hunt? Pm me if you like.
 
I agree with the general level of reply. I have no problem if people want to spend big money to shoot huge trophies inside the wire of an estate but none of these animals should be accepted for CIC medals.

CIC medals should only be awarded for free ranging animals hunted by fair chase methods. Interestingly in the same article Richard Prior makes it clear which fallow trophies were wild and which were park animals.

He makes it very clear that the new record from Herefordshire was a wild free ranging animal but isn't quite so clear about the Castle Douglas boar.
 
Wild boar

Hi guys

This is a genuine question and not meant to stir up trouble.

Whilst I fully appreciate and agree with the need to cull fenced animals, be them boar or deer or whatever - why would somebody pay a lot of money to do so?

I apologise if my ignorance offends anybody, but because ive only ever hunted and shot wild animals the question of fairness has never really been raised in my mind.

Ive not really got an opinion on whether im pro or anti this type of shooting, horses for courses and all that - im just curious as to the motivation for shelling out a lot of money to do so?

Is it pride in a good shot or shots, for the adrenalin rush or another reason?

Daemon

:confused:
 
Personally I do not think that any wild animal that is reared in captivity, should be offered up as a sporting opportunity. It may well be an opportunity but by no stretch of the imagination can, IMHO, it be considered sporting, and then to be accredited with a CIC medal, recognition of it being a world class trophy, I don't think so. To me there would be more satisfaction in eating a wild rabbit that I had shot with a rimfire, than there would be in having one of these canned hunt trophies hanging on my wall.

I suppose any farmer of wild boar will be able to set up "hunts" on their land soon, I cannot see much difference. I'm sorry people but to me it is neither hunting nor sporting. I personally think, that it is this type of what I can only see as being a money making scheme, that gives the general public a poor impression of us stalkers, hunters choose your own title. Not only that it provides ammunition for the antis to fire at us. Don't be fooled by the fact that it is not deer stalking and will not have an adverse effect on us, it will. As far as most people are concerned it is men and women with guns shooting animals.

The sad thing is you will always get people that want to have a trophy but are too tired to get off their arses and do it properly. They have the money to pay for one of these types of hunt and they will go on them. They then convince themselves that they were on some testosterone filled adventure in wild and frightening country and it was their unerring marksmanship that saw them through it all.

I don't like any of it.

John
 
I noticed in the fallow listings that most of the gold medal bucks were park shot as well.

How can these be compared with a wild trophy, they could have been fed to get the trophies large and to a degree it must tame them. They really cannot be compared to the challenge of stalking a wild animal.

I appreciate someone has go to cull park deer and they deserve respect but its a bit sad to compare them with a wild deer trophy.
 
I live right by Carminnows and it was proberly shot in the fenced off area which is very unsporting! The boar, deer and goats are so tame this gold medal could of been shot at 10 yards. There is no stalking envolved, you sit in a highseat then someone opens a gate lets the beast into the trap of being shot by some stupid american. I took my brother there to try out his new camera at christmas, all he had to do was get out of the car and stick his camera through the fence and the red deer didnt even move, there so tame they were posing for the camera.

i hope some how they all escape and go onto my land :lol:

Regards Brent
 
I think that no park bred animal should be judged or given a medal

Those of us that fish have been there and seen it already with the rainbow trout records. For years and years and years the rainbow trout record in the UK was about six pounds (or something like that).

Then in the last ten years with "pellet pig" farmed fish grown in little more than stew ponds it leaped to thirty pounds plus. Frankenstein fish with distended bellies that have been stuffed with artificial pellet food.

So I agree that these whole things are artificial. The problem is how to define the rules to exclude them.
 
doghound said:
I noticed in the fallow listings that most of the gold medal bucks were park shot as well.

How can these be compared with a wild trophy, they could have been fed to get the trophies large and to a degree it must tame them. They really cannot be compared to the challenge of stalking a wild animal.

I appreciate someone has go to cull park deer and they deserve respect but its a bit sad to compare them with a wild deer trophy.

This a bit of an exaggeration doghound as only 4 out of 9 fallow gold medal qualifying heads listed (or 15 total medals) were park deer and it is not clear whether any CIC medals were actually awarded to them. Certainly feeding will help but the size of antlers is as much to do with genetics. This doesn't however detract from a good point.

It really begs the question as to what is a wild deer. If a record buck from Petworth escaped and was then shot by a stalker in a neighbouring wood, is that a wild buck and how could you tell given that Petworth DNA would be common in the local wild stock? If it isn't then how long does it have to be out, or how many generations have to pass before they are wild?

At the extreme end it could be argued that most fallow or red, and all sika, muntjac or CWD are not wild. More sensibly you might want to consider any head that had been grown in the wild for the purposes of medals but again, how would you know?.

Of course this only really matters when considering trophies and most people concerned with deer management regard trophies as far less important than culling the right animals. This doesn't mean that we should not be interested in trophies, they are a good guide to the health of a population, but they are the cream on the cake of deer management.

Enfieldspares is right to draw comparisons with some of the fishing records, carp, catfish, brown and rainbow trout have suffered from this with fish of record size being released (in some cases after importing them), caught and claimed. As a result for some species no further record claims are being considered, for others there is a strict definition of what a "wild" fish is.

It is still complicated because in some waters big fish that might be defined as "wild" live under the stock cages and grow bigger picking up the pellets that fall into the water.

My own view is that no boar or deer shot inside an enclosure should be eligible for CIC or SCI medals not so much because of enhanced size but because this is not "fair chase" which is the over-riding principle of stalking wild deer. The new record UK boar from Herefordshire was a truly free ranging boar that might have been living a wild life for over 10 years but the Galloway boar was not and no medal should be awarded.

I have no problem with anyone who wants to shoot deer in an enclosure, they have to be controlled and why should the estate not charge a stalker willing to pay to do this, I have no problem with recording exceptional park deer, but that's all that should happen.

For free ranging deer it gets a lot more complicated and I think might be a can of worms and perhaps best left alone.

The only good news is that roe deer are probably completely uncontroversial being effectively entirely free ranging.
 
Paul k

I take your point about "most" I just dont think it appropriate to have any wild and park animals on the same comparison.

A conundrem for you, there are some excelent Roe within the Petworth Estate Wall and if a trophy animal was to be shot would it qualify? The acreage (thousands) enclosed well exceeds any, indeed many, Roe buck territories but by the true letter they may be classed as enclosed what do you think?
Clearly not free ranging by your defintiion a captive gene pool, would this also apply to island deer?
 
doghound said:
Paul k

I take your point about "most" I just dont think it appropriate to have any wild and park animals on the same comparison.

A conundrem for you, there are some excelent Roe within the Petworth Estate Wall and if a trophy animal was to be shot would it qualify? The acreage (thousands) enclosed well exceeds any, indeed many, Roe buck territories but by the true letter they may be classed as enclosed what do you think?
Clearly not free ranging by your defintiion a captive gene pool, would this also apply to island deer?

I actually agree with you. I don't think that park and wild deer have any place on a list together, Richard did at least note which were park and which were wild so that you could make the distinction yourself.

Your point about a Petworth roe is a good one but in this case, as roe are not kept as park animals I would regard a roe shot on Petworth as wild from the point of CIC scoring or medals. In the James Douglas video on roe stalking he does in fact shoot a nice buck on the Petworth estate and would have no problem in considering it as a wild buck in all respects.

I can see how it would be difficult to draw a line for other species, for example I think he also shot a fallow on (or just outside) the estate and the line would be distinctly blurred on that and this is why I think it is a potential can of worms.
 
By the sound of things ,the more boar farms ,the more escapees and eventually it will be cheaper to shoot them on the outside than the inside .
Considering there are farms the length and breadth of the country ,it will be interesting to see what develops in a few years time .
In the meantime a farm record is just that ! A farm record ,and should not be scored with wild animals.imo

+ I dont agree with "canned hunting ".
 
looks like Carminnows is up for sale with CKD Galbraith - if you have a few quid to spare it's all yours!
 
I was luckily enough to be up a high seat not far from castle Douglas with a good friend on Saturday night waiting for a group of Boar that have been seen feeding in the area. These are probably descendants of escapees from a fenced in enclosure owned by a well know advertiser in the sporting rifle! They are wild now and no longer fenced in. They are not far from New Abbey I’m not sure if this is where the Medal head was shot or if it was from an enclosure.
 
Just to muddy the waters...it all depends on how anyone defines 'wild and free' . For many years, one of the west coast highland estates advertised stag stalking and these stags were really heavy beasts. The stalking took place on an island - so are they 'wild and free'?? Of course, red deer can swim, but they were nevertheless restricted. The estate was the same size as many of the medium sized mainland estates. I've heard of folk putting deer or small islands , just a mile or two wide and selling them as unfenced .
It all depends on the size of the enclosure. I've watched large stags being stalked in a two thousand acre enclosure and once someone has stalked them a few times, they are not easy! Once you get to areas of more than 5,000 acres, deer within that area are usually able to move away & hide from danger if necessary...but then it all depends on how many people are stalking or if it's a huge driven hunt etc. etc.
I'd like to think we should all be proud of our tradition of our wild and free stalking here in the UK. Same goes for wild boar - which is why i take groups only to Poland. So many other countries, such as France, have a fair amount of thier boar shooting in an enclosure of some form or other
 
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