David Maddox: No harm in letting children see the feathers fly at Holyrood

The above picture is a sight that the authorities in the Scottish Parliament wish to protect the "innocent" eyes Scottish children who tramp through the doors each week on school trips. It is of course the mangled corpse of a pigeon - winged vermin - with its killer a hawk.

As reported in the Scotsman this week, Holyrood's chiefs are finally putting out a contract for a falconer to scare off the pigeons who are covering the Scottish Parliament with poo, not least the windows of the Scotsman office in the building, which the same authorities seem to be adverse to cleaning.

But one condition for the successful hawker is that the bird of prey involved does not actually kill a pigeon for fear of "a PR disaster" if it should slaughter one in front of a school party.

It seems to me that this kind of molly coddling, woolly minded thinking is on the same lines as the recent decriers of Action Men toys who believe their return will lead to a nation of killers.

The vast majority of youngsters who visit the parliament eat meat and one hopes study biology so actually seeing nature at work may even be educational.

You have to wonder too whether the people who worry about falconry violence have watched the sort of things children can see on television these days or play on their computers. Seeing an actual death rather than an animated one may give them a few more thoughts about what the consequences of violence actually are.

But, maybe my views are shaped because I am originally a Norfolk boy, quite used to the realities of "cun'ry loif." My first job, when I was five, was on a farm catching and killing chickens by wringing their necks for which I earned the princely sum of £5 in a week. The experience neither left me mentally scarred nor a psychopathic killer.

However, I should say that I did not have quite the same slightly scary determination as this 11-year-old son of a chicken farmer.