HUNTING (2)

I have never been a fan of hunting, either the English or the Danish version, though I do like to eat most of the things that hunters catch (I draw the line at fox). But there are a fair number of people, for whom killing animals is an obsession. I once knew a guy in Tanzania, who could think of nothing else. Tanzania is admittedly a great place to go hunting, but even so, he was very dull.

One of history's great animal killers was the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, the guy whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 provided the trigger for the First World War. He travelled the world looking for things to kill, and two of his trips to Poland nearly brought the European bison to extinction. He was an enthusiastic fan of the newly invented machine gun, which I would think was cheating, but he obviously didn't. Thousands of his kills were stuffed and hung in the imperial hunting lodges dotted about Austria-Hungary, notably Konopiste in Bohemia. The Nazis so liked the decorations that they used the lodge as a rest home for the S.S.

However, even the diligent Archduke would have had a hard time keeping up with Johann Georg, the Elector of Saxony during the first part of the seventeenth century. Nicknamed "Beer George" because of his fondness for drinking, he became Elector in 1611 when his elder brother had a heart attack after quaffing beer while in full armour. Johann Georg was one of the few rulers to see out the whole of the 1618-48 Thirty Years War, spending his time drinking, hunting and trying to avoid fighting. Between 1611 and 1653 he registered some 113,629 kills, which is impressive if you don't have a machine gun to help you.

Walter Blotscher