COR, don't you just bleed for those poor children who were so upset when Prince Philip shot a few pheasants near their school?

It took my mind back to my boyhood when my Uncle Alan regularly took me to the woods to shoot rabbits - which my Auntie Edith showed me how to skin and clean before cooking them in the pot. I also went fishing with my dad and we enjoyed many a nice trout as a result. What is it with this modern squeamishness and sentimental attachment to little furry creatures on the part of youngsters who, for the most part, have no understanding at all of the countryside?

Don't these modern kids understand that pheasants are there to be shot? That's what pheasants are for. Of course, most of those wimpish children have never actually eaten anything that was once recognisably an animal. Their diet is pizzas and burgers. Well, it must come as a surprise to them to learn that even a burger was once part of a cow. How do you educate people about the facts of culinary life who eat only baked beans, fish fingers and chicken nuggets? Even the fish finger was once part of a living fish. Even a chicken nugget derived from something that once ran about saying: "cluck".

The trouble with this squeamishness and mawkish sentimentality is that it is so arbitrary. If we are allowed to get upset over shot pheasants then why not about whatever it was that provided the salami for the pizza. And why stop at animals? Why don't they shed their same uneducated tears over every chopped spring onion or quartered cabbage? It's because their stupid attitude to the natural world consists entirely of merely two extreme responses: "Aw!" and "Yuk!" "Aw!" for little bunny rabbits and baby foxes and "Yuk!" for spiders and caterpillars.

Something has gone profoundly wrong with the way we bring up children these days. We shield them from wholesome activities such as bagging pheasants and hunting those vermin the foxes. But we expose them to promiscuous sex and trashy television at an early age. I don't know of anyone who was ever corrupted by shooting pheasants or bagging hares, but millions have been sexualised too early in their lives by the sale of childhood makeup kits and sexy dolls and by the children's programmes which parade as model examples tartish flirting and sleeping around.

What are children taught to become obsessed with these days? With the mindless amorality of such as Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the institutionalised yobbishness of Byker Grove. So many of our children have difficulty reading, but no difficulty at all in sending illiterate messages to one another by mobile phone or text. It's time that we gave them instead a proper introduction to the natural countryside where almost every creature is both predator and prey; and where chickens don't come out of packets. All this hypocrisy reminds me of the woman who went into a fashionable restaurant and was recommended the bird spittle soup. "Oh no. I couldn't possibly eat anything that came out of a bird's mouth," she said. "Just give me an egg."

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange