I live on a small island in the Atlantic, to the west of Scotland, where the local farmers mostly raise sheep. We have a serious problem with wild geese - not only can three of them eat as much grass as a sheep can, but they fowl the rest of it and the sheep cannot eat it then. So the farmers and their friends shoot the wild geese. My son in law shoots them, and tries to give me the birds for food, but first there is the problem of plucking them - those feathers are very fixed, and are the very devil to pull out, then there is all the fine down that hangs in the air for weeks, and makes one sneeze, but after that there is the problem with the actual meat. It has such a strong taste, one cannot eat it. After many experiments I found that if one used it to make a curry, the horrible taste can be masked but even then, hours and hours of boiling it cannot remove all the tendons and small bones that hold it together and make it a powerful flying machine but an awful thing to have to eat. My Daughter suggested just cutting off the breast muscles and giving the rest to the cats and dogs, but that seems a waste and anyway it still tastes too strong and once a year is quite enough. This is not just my opinion either.

We also have wild deer, that come down from the hills in winter, and will leap over fences built to keep the sheep out and will finish off all one's winter vegetables like cabbages in minutes. Venison is not so strong a flavour as goose but again the flesh is full of hard stringy bits making eating it a real toothbreaking battle.

Domesticated animals have been selectively bred for a thousand or more years to be soft and tender meat. Wild ones have bred themselves to be tough survivors, the result is that wild animals make very inferior food sources. We also have wild rabbits on the island - a domesticated, tame rabbit has pale meat that tastes delicious, but the wild ones are dark and stringy again. Also, from time to time the myxematosis runs through them still, and one is revolted at the thought of eating diseased animals.

When one looks into it, 'Man the Mighty Hunter' is only a macho myth - our stone age ancestors just came after the big cats when they had made a kill and chased them off when they had eaten their fill and stole the rest of the body to drag back to their caves. Mostly we were competing with the vultures and hyaenas, not the primary carnivores, and most of our food was roots and berries. Look at our teeth if you want proof ! The teeth say that we are omnivores, not carnivores.