It has finally happened. In my thirty-ninth year I have performed a rite of passage that ushers me into true manhood. I have killed a living beast with my own hands, cooked it and eaten it.
True, in many cultures across this planet this would be seen as nothing out of the ordinary. In places where people have not been divorced from the source of their food as we in the West have they know that if you want meat you have to kill one of your animals. No wonder meat is generally considered a luxury in such parts of the world.
The story of how I ended up with grilled pheasant breast for dinner on Monday is not for the faint-hearted so if you consider yourself such I suggest you skip this blogpost and spend a few minutes instead thinking about small lambs gambolling on the side of a grassy knoll as fluffy clouds scud past above... There, I think they've gone. On we go.
The unlucky bird in question I found by the side of the A-road at the top of my track, sat perfectly still as cars zoomed past. When I approached it didn't move so I picked it up and brought it down the track. It must have been hit by a car; there was some blood on its beak but no other obvious injuries. Setting it down it still wouldn't move, and coming back an hour later it was still there. I sat with it a few minutes. It seemed alert for a bit but then slowly its eyelids drooped and it sank lower until the sound of a car passing brought it back to wakefulness. I offered it a leaf to nibble but it showed no interest. It was clearly going to die, if not of starvation then of internal injuries or by being attacked by something, none of which are pleasant end-scenarios. The moral imperative was on me to end its suffering.
How to do it exactly? Consulting a friend by text I learned I had to hold its neck and pull its head very hard, to break it. I worked up my courage over lunch, then put on some gloves and returned. It probably viewed me as its saviour having rescued it from the road. It did however begin to struggle when I grasped it below the neck with one hand. Quickly before I lost the nerve I took its head in my other hand and yanked hard. It didn't work, the bird was still alive but silently writhing and flapping with a newly-elongated neck. I tried again, the neck extended again and bled but it still flapped. A third time, and now it looked like some kind of horror-pheasant, an evil parody of a swan, but it had not died. This was terrible, I was supposed to be putting it out of its misery but was instead causing it grievous injury. Figuring that no animal can live without its head, I decided to tug so hard that it would probably sever it from its body, and that's exactly what happened. I threw both pieces of the pheasant on the ground and watched the body jig and kick for another minute or so until it finally rested. In peace, I hope.
Once my heart had returned to a more normal rhythm I took the bird and hung it from its legs from my washing line and got on with my afternoon tasks. Around 6pm it was time to make dinner, which on this occasion meant slicing up a fresh pheasant carcase to extract the breast meat. I sterilised my Swedish hunting knife in boiling water, laid the pheasant on some newspaper, shooed the flies away as best I could and began hacking at it. I have no doubt there is a tried-and-trusted technique for doing this but without the internet, relevant books or knowledgeable friends to hand and a growing appetite, I just figured it out myself. Before too long I had the breast meat on a tray, and the rest of the bird in a bin-liner. I know there's more meat there but one step at a time, OK? Having rinsed the meat under the tap and dried it, it was just a case of grilling it and re-heating some veg and pasta I'd made earlier. The flesh wasn't as tough as I had expected, and tasted slightly stronger than chicken. But, free meat! I couldn't get over it.
As it happened I had just finished reading the new ZeroCarbonBritain report which sets out a scenario for how the UK can reduce our net carbon emissions to zero by 2030, one of the factors being a massive reduction in how much meat we eat (to allow grazing land to be converted to other uses). The report is thought-provoking and definitely worth a read. It got me thinking how eating pheasant is pretty low-carbon – the birds don't take up any land exclusively, and don't require too much feeding. Then I remembered that they attract the likes of Michael Schumacher and Dame Kiri te Kanawa, flying here in their personal jets or helicopters for a day of shooting before zooming off again, and realised the true carbon cost of the humble pheasant.
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