Everyone seems to feel free to tell farmers how to run their business. Of course, when it comes to public unease about the products of the same farmers, it is understandable. Meat just now. But, in general, the non farming public likes to let the agricultural sector know that it has its eyes open.
For example, just recently, a commuter between Meath and Dublin wondered why there seemed to be a fresh outbreak of digging at ditches and scrapping of hedges. We all remember the funeral pyres of the early seventies when EEC money, as it then was, came to prominence. A group of fields became one prairie. Great bonfires of hawthorns, in particular. What effect does that have on wild pheasant numbers is silage - shortage of pheasants may be at least partly due to the wiping out of hedges: linear woodlands, as some call them. (It's fair to say that another suggestion about the reason for declining, or apparently declining, wild pheasant numbers is silage - too early cutting).
Hares are known to like big, open fields. But when their cover is diminished by the eradication of hedges on a massive scale, the subsequent rolling hillocks of grassland, with only the odd whin for cover, leave the hare to the mercies of those parties of men with greyhound and lurcher, which makes up Sunday sport for more and more. One particular prairie, formerly a network of small fields, retained for some years a high population of hares. Now it is almost an event to see one.
And it is not much good telling farmers about the virtue of foxes. Even if they don't keep chickens as they used to, many of them are in gun clubs and help to rear pheasants, or even want to see a few hares about the place. Or just have an atavistic anti fox feeling. The magazine mentioned noted a session given in the North about the control of fox numbers. At least a couple of people from Dublin made the 350 mile round trip to North Antrim and back in one day.
Experts differ, but James Fairley in An Irish Beast Book says he doesn't think much of bounty schemes for suppressing them. Indeed, you might read into his chapter on the fox that the more you kill them, the better they replace their numbers.