Susannah Constantine is a tv presenter. Talks about clothes. Bitches about other women’s sortorial faux pas. I’ve never watched her. Until she learns to kick a football, becomes a man and puts on a Spurs shirt (and trust me; we’ve fielded worse, much worse), I have no interest in her tv antics.

But yesterday I read an article by her and I’m growing a new respect for this woman who initially found fame by dating a minorish royal for a few years.

Then she and Viscount Linley split up (I was devastated) and she married someone else and had child/children. Nice.

Her daughter is now 11. And, being ‘country folk’, the daughter was taken on her first duck shoot (sounds like a Marks Brothers movie, but that was Duck Soup, and was even funnier than killing ducks) at which the daughter managed to kill a duck or two with her shotgun. Good for her. Susannah, steeped in country tradition and rural culture, ‘blooded’ her daugher by putting a dab of the dead ducks blood on her face. Which to us townies seems a bit pagan, a touch Rambo, a symbolic act not out of place in Seven Samurai. But which passes for ‘normal’ in the big green bits outside the M25.

And there is big brouhaha about this. Big one.

Accusation of encouraging murder, duckicide, of teaching children to kill. As if today’s duck hunter is tomorrow’s high school shoot-em-up perp.

We have similar customs in the Cities. When my daughter first bought a piece of beef from Tescos, we tore off a bit of the cling-film and stuck it on her forehead.

Yet ‘duck-gate’ is the new fox hunting, so it would appear. On the radio yesterday afternoon some guy (read: ‘tosser’) called in to have his say. Which was that killing all animals is wrong. Become a vegan. All killing is murder. Blah, blah, blah, and missed the point by a country mile. This is not about the perceived morality of eating meat. Its about kids actually learning what meat really is. That is was once part of some animal. That in some ways it is sustainable. That killing ‘free range’ animals is perhaps much more acceptable than factory farming. And most importantly, its about the right to perform perfectly legal activities, put food on the table and educate your children without a bunch of fascists moaning that its not politically correct and that ducks have ‘human rights’ too. Actually, they don’t.

I’ve never been on a fox hunt, nor shot a duck. But if that’s what people in the countryside choose to do, its surely a better use of their time than incest. It controls otherwise saturated animal populations and feeds the good folk in the rurals.

As for the horror of ‘putting a gun in the hands of a child!!!!!’, she was supervised (obviously) and guns are part of country life. So teach ’em young and teach ’em well. Guns aren’t dangerous. People are dangerous. Surely better to be taught the appropriate time and place to use a shotgun than sitting a child in front of a ‘first-person-shooter’ video game for six hours, like most vegan parents do. Possibly.

Susannah’s only real ‘crime’ was to post a picture of the blooded daughter on instagram. Some things are best kept within the cultures that understand them.

Happy monday

A xxxx