Metamorphosis and the price of being legal.

My passport runs out in March this year. I have acquired a passport renewal form. Now I just need some photos. Oh, and the £75 it is going to cost me. 

If I needed to renew a gun license it would only cost me £50. But I don't have a gun so I don't need a cut-price license. Apparently it costs the police £196 to carry out the background checks but someone decided it would not be fair to pass on the full cost to the gun license holder. After all, the people who are most likely to own guns and need licenses for them are the most impoverished in the country: people who go hunting and shooting! 

Yes, I know that farmers have shotguns as well and they are not necessarily going to be among the richest in the land. There are exceptions to every rule! 

Still on the huntin', shootin' fishin' theme - outdoor pursuits, don't you know? - it seems that if you rear pheasants they count as livestock and so you are entitled to a VAT exemption and possibly other benefits, because you are producing food!. Very nice! If you want to organise a shoot, however, you have to release them into the wild so that they stop being livestock and count as wild birds. Otherwise they cannot be hunted. Then, after the shoot is over and, with rearing for next year in mind, you recapture the birds who have evaded the shotguns, then they revert to being livestock and you can go on claiming the tax exemption. Isn't that handy? 

It's amazing the stuff you can find out quite accidentally! Stuff other people post online! 

If a pheasant accidentally causes damage to someone else's property while they are being rounded up so that they can metamorphose back into livestock, the rounder-upper is not liable because at that point the pheasants are still wild. It's a kind of beneficial Catch-22!

Funnily enough, my father accidentally killed a pheasant years ago on his allotment. The silly bird was eating his young bean plants and he had chased it off unsuccessfully several times. In the end he threw a stick at it and by a fluke hit it on the head. The bird topped over and never got up again. A pheasant's head is very small so it probably doesn't take much to cause fatal brain damage. So there was my father with a dead pheasant. On his way home he called in at the local butchers and asked if he would clean it and pluck it for him. The butcher, however, refused to touch it on the grounds that it was a game bird and it was not yet the hunting season! So my father took it home and dealt with it himself. 

When they eventually cooked the offending bird, my parents declared themselves unimpressed and did not understand what all the fuss was about.