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I think there may be a problem of communication between Perelman and  
Brewer. The word 'hunting' does not mean the same in Britain as in  
America. 
 
In Britain, 'hunting means to pursue foxes, hare, occasionally stags in  
a few places, with a pack of hounds. The hunters follow the hounds  
either on horseback (the gentry and the -- capitalist -- farmers) or on  
foot, bicycle etc. (the lower orders). No useful food is provided for  
any human by this sport, and scarcely even for the hounds. 
 
However, a great deal of food is obtained by 'shooting' (never called  
'hunting' in English). The principal targets are pheasant and other game  
birds. Landlords who prefer shooting to hunting 'preserved' pheasants in  
woods and copses on their estates. Sometimes they even risked grave  
unpopularity in the county by allowing their gamekeepers to shoot foxes.  
[Note that foxes and pheasants are subsitutes, not complements. Hence  
there was/is a perpetual conflict of interest between hunters and  
shooters] Pheasants in particular make a tempting target for poachers,  
and it was to defend these that mantraps and spring-guns were installed,  
and the Game Laws enforced. 
 
Hunting does no damage to crops, for the season is confined to the  
Winter months. But the preserving of pheasant for shooting produces a  
great deal of damage to crops. There was therefore an even sharper  
conflict of interest -- in early 19th C. England -- between capitalist  
farmers and those of their betters who preserved pheasant and employed  
the Game Laws to that end. In this context, the Game Laws were decidely  
anti-capitalist -- a vestige of those 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic  
relations' to which 'the bourgoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand,  
has put an end'. [I wonder if a second source of confusion may lie in  
the fact that in English 'farmer' means a capitalist who hires land from  
a landlord and labour from among the villagers and employs these to  
produce crops for the market; whereas in American 'farmer' means a  
landlord who works his own land? Neither quite fits Marx's notion of the  
'bourgois', by definition an urban being.] 
 
The situation in Scotland is quite different from that in England. There  
is far less hunting (except in one or two Lowland counties such as  
Ayreshire) and far more shooting. The principal targets are grouse and  
similar game-birds, and deer, each of which provide valuable food. But  
the shooting takes place on vast grouse moors and deer forests which are  
almost completely useless for any other purpose save extensive sheep and  
cattle grazing -- which can usually coexist with the brief annual  
seasons on grouse and deer. Note that 'deer parks' occur not in Scotland  
but in England -- as in the grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford -- and  
are largely ornamental. 
 
In my opinion it is impossible to write with any understanding of the  
Game Laws, their economic consequences and their ideological  
implications without at least this minimum of information. I do not  
believe that either Marx or Engels had any knowledge or experience  
whatsoever of British rural culture. There were typical urban  
intellectuals. (We used to call them 'townies'.) Although he married  
into an aristocratic family -- or possibly because of it -- Marx wrote  
disparagingly of 'the idiocy of rural life'. What Marx and Engels knew  
about was urban culture (which is far less geographically specific) and  
the effects upon this of industrialisation. 
 
Anthony Waterman 
 
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