Hun 1 Falcon 0

It's good to be humbled once in a while.... For me at least, I find myself perfecting that balance between hunting / killing and wanting my falcons succeed yet doing so with style, grace and good ethics. I'm always guided when hunting of the saying "If you accomplish something good with hard work, the labour passes quickly, but the good endures; if you do something shameful in pursuit of pleasure, the pleasure passes quickly but the shame endures". At times we can get so caught up in the hunt that when it gets protracted, that we have to stop and ask ourselves what are we trying to achieve here. Months of working towards high pitches and stylish flying can be undone in moments, in the greed of making a kill, particularly if repeated enough times. of course there are times it is needed but to the uninformed observer it can appear contradictive when witnessing someone ending a flight with one bird and yet doing the exact opposite with another. Usually a young inexperienced bird that at the time is felt more important to succeed than to do it with any style. We can work on the latter in time but the priority is to build confidence in the inexperienced falcon. In this case Wesson my hybrid doesn't need confidence, if anything he needs humbling, and i'm not about killing for killing sake, but today he dominated the partridge and the proximity of cover eventually led to the flight turning ratty. The partridge flew well and used its experience and proximity to cover to survive. It reached a point I didn't want to kill it at all costs. those days of my formative years are long behind me. This decision is different for each of us, in part depending at what phase of our falconry career we are at, and i respect that, no judgement here. Certainly my falcon had no care and my dogs were also caught up in the intensity of it all but it was the human feelings of mercy and aesthetics that came into play ... and yet are so blatantly absent in nature. Personally I would have felt a hollow victory if my falcon had killed this partridge towards the end, in fact it shouldn't have even gone as far as it did. These late winter huns are no slouch yet it did its best to evade capture and it deserved to live in my books. The falcon will forgive me the minute I feed him and the dogs, ... well the dogs know i'm not the best hunter and they do their best to help me and put up with my shortcomings.