It's that time of the year when hunting comes to the fore – the festive news-week where not much is going on so editors have more in the way of empty pages to fill. Earlier this week just about every daily newspaper carried images of Boxing Day meets, with the probable result that citizens living in concrete places harrumphed while those occupying greener parts smiled with gratification that such ancient scenes should continue.

That's a generalisation, of course. There are people living in cities who like the idea of belting about on horses accompanied by hounds, and some countryfolk who abhor the whole idea. What you're not meant to do is be ambivalent – especially if you are a columnist specialising in rural affairs. A guest staying over Christmas ticked me off for taking the middle ground, saying that I should have the guts to come off the fence one way or the other.

Well, I can't. The fence is where I find myself – but it may be worth explaining why I am so utterly and profoundly ambivalent about field sports. The central thrust of my fence-sitting is that I don't want to go hurtling around killing animals – but at the same time really don't care if others do.

What I do care about is the increasing and insidious habit the urban world has of attempting to lord it over those of us who live out in the sticks. Maybe it's some kickback to the days when toffs living in vast mansions in the countryside used to dictate matters to one and all – especially poor blighters working in the grim factories that made them rich in the first place.

There's a kind of inherited notion in the national psyche that countryfolk are either aristocrats, or vicious bloodthirsty peasants of the straw-sucking kind. The real countryside, of course, isn't like that at all. Just like it's not really very much like anything you might ever hear in The Archers – which is the one national entity that is meant to represent us hedgerow dwellers.

Yes, there are a handful of genuine toffs left – and a whole host of wannabe toffs who turn up in the countryside part time. A sensible world should regard such folk as a charming English idiosyncrasy. But I have to say the latter have made a sizeable mark here in the Westcountry. Wannabe toffs have taken to the annihilation of pheasants with great aplomb.

This is the one field sport which puzzles me most of all. I can imagine the thrill of stalking some dangerous wild animal by employing much skill and guile – but shooting a creature with less brain power than the average slug or snail? Yesterday I watched a pheasant which had flown into the little veg patch my neighbour has fenced off in his garden. If the stupid bird had been equipped with a single brain cell it would have realised that escaping was simply a matter of hopping over the three foot fence.

But no, the daft creature ran up and down inside this unsubstantial barrier all day long. A host of his mates even came to look at him with that curious beady-eyed blankness those birds share with brainless chickens, and chickens alone. There were cabbages in the veg patch with more intelligence than the pheasant.

And yet a huge industry has evolved which sees countless thousands of folk turning up to simply stand – not stalk – and blast away at these moronic bundles of feathers. Fine by me. I really cannot get excited one way or the other – and certainly have no sympathy for creatures that are so extraordinarily dim-witted. Moreover I have a great many friends who love nothing better than to go out beating, gun loading or blasting away on small "farmer shoots" which offer a kind of salt-of-the-earth field sport I can see nothing wrong with whatsoever.

One such shoot passed by yesterday – and here's an odd thing. All the daft pheasants who'd turned up to watch their mate in the cage flew off to inevitable doom, while the idiot bird remained safe with the cabbages. Come evening, I saw him swaggering around on top of the fence, crowing like the cock of the roost. So perhaps he wasn't quite so daft. Maybe the stupid one is me – sticking my neck through a hole in the fence by writing about hunting and field sports. By being ambivalent I'll make no friends and probably create a few enemies.