Some thoughts on the ethics of squirrel pie

I had a squirrel pie for my lunch today. It was really tasty and I can recommend Pots 'n' Pies products on the basis of this experience!

I was also delighted to see the product on sale openly at the Bingley Fine Food Fair. It suggests that there is a little hope for us yet. After endless hectoring by vegetarian lobbyists and generations of dressed rabbits in books, film and on TV, we may at last be growing up. We may finally realise that not eating something because of some misplaced concept of ethics is stupid.

I don't mind at all if you want to be a vegetarian. It doesn't bother me in the slightest if you prefer not to eat fois gras or tuna. I'm quite content for you to worry whether your food is fair trade, organic, shade grown and lacking in food miles. I'm quite OK (although they won't thank you for it) for you to make your own children conform to your faddist behaviour. You can even sign up to the more bonkers fringes of food faddism such as being a vegan.

But I do mind if you foist your squeamishness, your fads and your obsessions onto others. If I want to shoot and eat wild fowl, squirrels and deer, that's my business and nothing to do with you. If I want to chase down wild boar and deer with dogs (a pretty efficient way of hunting these animals), that should be my business - nothing to do with you.

So I'll go on eating squirrel pie, freshly trapped rabbit and shot game birds. And I'll also enjoy goose liver pate wherever it's produced. Animals don't have rights but I do - and one of those rights is to eat what I want to eat, drink what I want to drink and smoke if I want to smoke.

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