I think many boys experience something similar – plinking at cardboard targets or tin cans with an air gun eventually palls. They know of the destructive power of a gun and have seen it in a sanitised version thousands of times on the screen, so they want to try it out in real life.
A bird is shot, and then there is an immediate feeling of remorse, disgust and guilt; all the stronger because that creature's probable suffering and death is pointless yet completely irreversible. For many youngsters that is their first experience of the messy finality of death and it has an enduring effect.
It endures among those who hunt, shoot and fish as well – or I believe it should. These days I only shoot what I or my friends are prepared to eat, be it pheasant, rabbit, deer, pigeon or goose. Every time that irreversible act is done, and a living, sentient creature crumples in a mass of meat, fur or feather, there is a moment of remorse. Who am I to take the life of another creature – a thing of miraculous beauty which until moments ago was sharing the air that I breathe, whose heart was pumping and whose senses were probably registering far more than mine?
And yet I do, and I know many others who feel similarly – who kill and yet do so with a curious mix of feelings; who feel the elation of the chase or the sheer exhaustion of the hill-stalk, the satisfaction of the combination of science and skill that results in the kill and yet who look at their quarry with respect.
I do it because I eat meat, and because I believe we need to respect the creatures that provide us with that meat. For the same reason that I will only eat free-range chicken, beef and pork, I would rather eat a creature that has had a free and natural life and whose end seems to me to be a part of the cycle of nature; of the link between predator and quarry that defines the roles of so many species. The fact that I do this with a gun rather than with a spear, with a trap or with tooth and nail is simply a measure of the fact that homo sapiens as a species has almost uniquely evolved as a tool user.

Yet, of course, that is only one part of the argument. No-one eats the fox that is killed by the hounds or, now, shot by the huntsman. But there, too, there is something of the same feelings engendered by hunting for the pot, with the added edge that here there is risk involved. Few would argue that in the UK, with its artificial countryside, 'nature' can go her way in some prelapsarian state.
Consider. We think nothing of grubbing out weeds from our fields and gardens, of eliminating parasites from our livestock and of destroying rats, mice, flies, ants, wasps, cockroaches or other vermin that cross that threshold between the 'wild places' and our own. Yet each of these is an organism evolved over millions of years with a singular gift (which we share) of exploiting opportunities to help its kind increase. Yet we destroy them because they are 'inconvenient' or destructive or economically threatening. Most of the time we destroy them without a second thought; it is part an parcel of maintaining the balance between us and nature.
Yet that same balance has to be maintained with other creatures as well – creatures with big brown eyes who dressed up and spoke in our storybooks as children. Deer, those gentle bambis, need to have their populations managed lest we face either a desertification of our woodland habitats or acquiesce in the regular starvation of older or weaker specimens. So we cull them with guns.
And the fox – wily old Charlie, Reynardine or whatever you wish to call it. In an unmanaged world without sheep, poultry, gamebirds, domestic rubbish bins and all the other tweaks that we have added to nature, the fox population would regulate itself admirably. But when we enter the equation things get skewed. Foxes thrive on our plenty; our chicken runs become irresistible, our rubbish a source of convenience food and our game coverts a ready larder.
So we regard an unchecked fox population as unacceptable. What do we do about it? There is shooting which, done properly, is effective. But shooting isn't simple. It means using a rifle that is difficult to acquire in our gun-fearing society, and it means long nights spent waiting with lamp and gun for the fox to offer a clear target – nights when most farmers I know are grabbing what little sleep they can get (particularly at the moment, when lambing is turning many of my friends into sleep-deprived zombies!)
Then there is poison. Dose a piece of carrion with something lethal and you could well put paid to a fox and its litter, but you would also wipe out badgers, buzzards, kites and many other species, so say nothing of the secondary effects of such lethal chemicals leaching into the soil to affect other organisms.
Or there's snaring. A fox runs into a wire noose laid the previous night and slowly throttles itself, writhing and thrashing so much in its efforts to escape that it will sometimes break its own bones (supposing that a cat didn't find the snare first), to be found in a grotesque rictus the following morning.
Or there is another option. Like the falconer who uses the skills of another beast to his own end, we can use dogs. They can find and flush a fox in daylight, and they have the stamina to run it down, and they have the strength to kill it extremely quickly.
It was a technique that developed maybe half a millennium ago, and it has gone on to become a sport because there are people who enjoy the thrill of seeing a pack of hounds, moving almost as one, quarter and turn through field and coverts, using senses so much more refined than ours, to track the fox. It can take some time, with false starts and frustrations, before the fox goes from first scent to full view, and that is when the chase begins – that scene that we think we know so well.
The hounds will invariably pursue the fox for as long as it takes to bring it down; that is their instinct, honed by selective breeding. The death takes just a moment, yet many professional huntsmen will acknowledge that in that moment they feel the same feelings I have described earlier because they respect their quarry.
The huntsman and his assistants are among the few likely to be there when the fox is killed. Following them will be the field of other rides. These are the majority, and they are there for a number of reasons. Foremost is the exhilaration of riding pell mell across country with all the risks that entails. They aren't following defined tracks in an orderly trot – this is a chance to enjoy riding at its rawest. There are others who follow for the thrill of seeing the dogs work and for whom the movements of the pack are as fascinating as a game of furry, steaming chess. There will inevitably be a few who have come because they think this will give them an entrée to some privileged world, but they will probably go home – cold, stiff and sore – at the end of the day and wonder why on earth they came.
I can imagine that not one person is there, however, to exult in the death of the fox, or for the experience of seeing it killed. Very few people who hunt actually see the kill – it happens in an instant when the leading hounds catch the fox. For most the first they know is a note on the horn and the sight of a milling pack of dogs ahead suddenly coming to a halt.
But everyone who hunts does it because they enjoy it. For many in the modern world, it provides an atavistic chance to connect – to connect with one species hunting another and to connect with a sense of risk and exhilaration that is largely absent today.
To end a rather long post, I cannot see anything to be ashamed of in that, and I see the death of the fox in the chase as a natural thing. For all these reasons I find it sad that hunting has been outlawed. For me it is the severance of one more thread that binds us to a world we increasingly disrespect and exploit.