HUNTING

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was a best-selling book during the 1990's, which basically said that men and women are from different planets. Unless and until both sexes recognise this, misunderstandings (and worse) will abound.

Education has softened the edges of the "man as warrior, woman as nurturer" stereotype, but one area of life where it still seems to hold true is hunting. Lots of people hunt in Denmark. Not, as in England, in red jacket and on horseback, riding after hounds and chasing a fox (the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable, as Oscar Wilde once famously put it); but in olive green jackets, on foot, and with a rifle. Deer, pheasant, wild duck, and the occasional hare seem to be the targets. We get a lot of the first two in the wood next to our house, so autumn weekends are often punctuated by loud bangs. They were out in force today.

In order to hunt in Denmark, you need a licence, a "jagttegn". 171,609 of these were issued in 2012, of which 161,740 were to men and only 9,869 to women. It seems that the role of women is still mainly to feed those men after they have come in from a hard day's work shooting, and to cook whatever they come back with (something, I have to say, that my mother-in-law does very well indeed). There may be equality between the sexes in the workplace, but there is certainly not out in the sticks.

Walter Blotscher