No this isn't a joke, well not to me anyway.


On Friday evening I met my shooting buddy up at our farm shoot, this was around 20:00hrs.

The fields we lamp over are approx half a mile from the main farm. We use these at night so we don't disturb anyone (well so we thought).

On the opposite side of the field entrance is another farm. We park our vehicles about 200 yards from this farm, again so we don't disturb them.

Anyway, we were sat chatting quietly letting the fields settle prior to shooting. The farm opposite us has dogs, which were barking like crazy at something and had been when we arrived, they'd never done this during the 3 odd years we have shot over the land. After about 10 minutes we saw torch light coming from the farm and across to where we were sitting. I approached the 'torch bearer' to find out it was the farmer, he was absolutely mortal drunk. I explained to him what we were up to and asked what was wrong. He said someone was mooching about his property setting the dogs off. I told him there was no-one about that we had seen. He then pottered off and we went shooting. Had a great night bagging 15 rabbits. We then left the farm via another gate and I was home by 23:00.

Next day I get a message to contact our farmer, which I did. I was then subject to an angry barrage. The long and the short of it was 'we' had been shooting with full bore rifles disturbing livestock at 02:00 that morning in the very field we had been in. I tried to explain that neither my mate or myself have an FAC never mind 'full bore' rifles. We were not shooting at 2am and if we had a FAC surely he would know! We were shooting with fully moderated HW100s with the Jim Edge silencer (anyone with one will know how quiet they are)

Anyway we got banned from the farm.

The good news is we managed to secure an 11 acre plot of equestrian, stables and grazing land with a rabbit problem this morning.
Ain't life odd.

Dazz