Hunting and Shooting: The Ambiguities of ‘Country Sports’ Peter Squires Introduction This chapter discusses live animal shooting as a ‘country sport’ and the attitudes and practices associated with it It begins by discussing recent cases of gratuitous ‘trophy hunting’ and the controversies these have generated before moving on to consider the cultural and historical changes which have shaped the development of shooting as an elite country sport and the changing sensibilities towards it The chapter discusses the character, or ‘nature’, of this form of shooting and, in particular, challenges some of the justifications advanced for the ‘sport shooting’ of live animals, especially those arguments which claim that hunting and shooting engender a distinctive sense of respect or ‘communion’ with the natural world (Kheel 1995) By way of contrast, the chapter then turns to consider the substantially non-natural prevalence of intensive grouse shooting, especially in Scotland, where a highly concentrated and unaccountable pattern of private estate ownership, geared primarily to shooting activities, has generated significant collateral harms for local environments whilst also resulting in much illegal persecution (poisoning) of indigenous predators, especially rare birds of prey and protected species A body of recent research P Squires (*) Professor of Criminology and Public Policy, School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom e-mail: p.a.squires@brighton.ac.uk © The Author(s) 2017 J Maher et al (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Animal Abuse Studies, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-43183-7_14 289