I HAVE survived the experience, you may be interested to know, or not, as the case may be. I have driven the length of France on the first weekend of the small game shooting season without having my car or my person sprayed with shot or pierced by bullets being fired from the rather enthus-iastic devotees of la chasse.

The word translates as "hunting" but has completely different connotations over there. Instead of dressing up in red coats and setting off on horseback to tear foxes to bits with the aid of a pack of dogs (while hoisting two digits to the farcical hunting "ban"), French hunters take to the woods and thickets armed with firearms of various sorts with the intention of shooting at anything that creeps, flies, gallops, crawls, trots or slithers.

Come the first weekend of the season and the countryside rings with the sound of hunting horns and, every so often, a volley of shots. But it is as much a social occasion as an exercise in bringing back meat for the pot.

Almost too much of one, in fact. Year on year, there is a distressing toll of death and injury among the chasseurs, a combination of three factors: a scarcity of game in some areas – the result of over-shooting; the totally unbridled passion for the activity leading to people loosing off at anything which rustles or moves within 50 yards, whether it's a partridge or your fellow-hunter Jean-Philippe the baker from the next village; and, it must be admitted, booze. Alas, the demon drink is recognised as playing something of a real role in the unscheduled letting of human blood. Most hunters observe the time-honoured ritual of a stiffener before setting out first thing in the morning, followed by an aperitif at the start of the lunch break, plus a goodly quaff of vin rouge during the al fresco midday repast.

With the result that, come the afternoon, both aim and judgment can be disastrously impaired. The situation has now become so worrying that hunting associations are formally enjoining their members to go easy on the bottle.

Down in the Cevennes, in the South West, one association president has posted a notice pleading with his members to limit themselves to one aperitif at lunchtime. Any more, he warns, risks damage to life and limb. What his members do at the end of the hunting session is entirely their affair, he says but, during the day, take it easy. The statistics are hardly likely to be helped by the scarcity of small game, particularly rabbits, whose numbers have been depleted by myxomatosis. On the other hand, there are wild boar in abundance.

I've often wondered what happened to the boar liberated from a farm in Devon a year or so ago, and whether they are now breeding happily in the wild. However, should anyone be tempted to go after any of them it would be wise to adopt precautions: boar are notoriously savage when cornered and so many French hunters' dogs have been ripped open by their sharp tusks that their owners are now being urged to invest in Kevlar waistcoats for them.