Kate Middleton reportedly doesn’t like all of the Royal Family’s traditions, especially when it comes to hunting.
According to the Daily Mail, a forthcoming book—Yes, Ma’am:
The Secret Life of Royal Servants by Tom Quinn—reveals Princess Kate’s feelings on the royal tradition of “blooding.”
Per the outlet, young members of the Royal Family are taken hunting for the first time, and the “blood of his or her first kill” is “smeared” across their face.
“Charles’s daughter in-law, Catherine, Princess of Wales, has put her foot down and insisted there will be no blooding for her children,” Quinn wrote. Princess Kate’s refusal to let her kids take part in the tradition is actually quite unusual, particularly as her husband, Prince William, was introduced to “blooding” at a young age.
In his memoir Spare, Prince Harry wrote about his own experience of the “blooding” tradition. When he was just 15, Prince Harry was taken hunting in Balmoral by a hunting guide named Sandy. Prince Harry alleged that, after shooting a deer, Sandy took the “blooding” tradition too far by pushing the royal’s head into the animal carcass.
“I tried to pull away, but Sandy pushed me deeper,” Harry wrote in Spare, via Hello! magazine. “I was shocked by his insane strength. And by the infernal smell. My breakfast jumped up from my stomach.”
Despite the obvious trauma associated with the tradition, Prince Harry somehow found solace in his actions. “Managing their numbers meant saving the deer population as a whole, ensuring they’d have enough food for winter,” Harry wrote in his memoir. “Finally, I’d been good to the community. A big stag in the larder meant plenty of good meat for those living around Balmoral.” He continued, “These virtues had been preached to me from an early age, but now I’d lived them, and felt them on my face. I wasn’t religious, but this ‘blood facial’ was, to me, baptismal.”
Judging by Prince Harry’s visceral account of “blooding,” it’s perhaps unsurprising that Princess Kate doesn’t want her kids to experience the ritual.