Opinion: Licences to shoot crows and pigeons are an utter farce

So, will the last weekend of April 2019 be remembered as the only moment in the history of British farming when farmers weren’t allowed to shoot a woodpigeon unless they filled a form in first?

Maybe we could commemorate the dates 28-29 April by naming them something like “The Free Woody Weekend” or “The Great Pea Crop surrender”? Either way, I’m sure I won’t forget the whole curious episode. When you find yourself on the Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show explaining to eight million listeners why scarecrows don’t really work, you know something strange must have happened.

See also: A guide to effective bird-scaring kits for farmers

As an officeholder of the NFU, you get a sense of which issues are going to get the membership fired up and, when I first heard that Natural England was going to rescind the general licence that allows farmers to shoot pigeons and crows, it was almost as if I could hear the fuse to the powder keg being lit. Quite rightly, farmers would be very angry.

And they were. On the evening of the announcement, I found myself at an NFU branch meeting in Suffolk, where there were more questions about the pigeon shooting ban than there was about Brexit.

The news that to stay legal when pigeon shooting you would have to register on a website that would probably crash, did not go down well, and understandably so. If there’s one thing that annoys farmers, it is petty, pointless bureaucracy that hinders them protecting their stock and crops.

It is not as if pigeons or crows were in any need of extra protection. In the UK they number in the millions and their populations have more than trebled in the past 30-40 years.

When I mentioned that on the Jeremy Vine Show, the host almost spat his coffee over his microphone in shock. Such is the conditioning in the BBC to assume that every bird species in the farmed countryside is facing extinction because of “industrial agriculture” – whatever that is.

After my couple of minutes in front of the BBC microphone, Jeremy played “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” by Elton John, after which a Scottish lady phoned in to explain how crows peck out the eyes of young lambs.

Then it was “Albatross” by Fleetwood Mac, after which a man called Derek from Daventry was allowed air-time to give a graphic account of what magpies do to songbird nests.

I’m not sure what happened to Mr Vine’s lunchtime listener figures, but I thought it made for excellent radio. It was a timely reminder for a large swathe of middle England that the British countryside isn’t actually like The Animals of Farthing Wood, where all the animals go round together as one big happy gang.

Hopefully, by the time you read this some sanity will have returned and you will no longer be required to fill in a form before you shoot a pigeon or a crow.

But who knows what lies around the corner in this increasingly mad world we live in? Asbos for Jack Russells caught frightening rats? Movement restriction orders on household cats caught molesting robins?

On second thoughts, if the usual farmer-bashers did advocate cat quotas, they might actually be doing something positive to save some songbird populations. But that might lose some conservation organisations a few subs, so that won’t happen.