Landowning rural charities and public bodies such as the National Trust and the Forestry Commission are susceptible to pressure to force trail hunts off their land. Rather than honouring their own obligations to support rural life, they find it easier to give in to noisy pressure groups and social media pile-ons.
The fact remains, however, that the ban was brought in, not on the basis of evidence, but of prejudice. No official inquiry ever found that hunting was crueller than any other form of pest control. It was endlessly said by supporters of the ban, for example, that the fox was “torn apart alive” by hounds. This was not the case. It was killed with great speed by the lead hound breaking its neck (I have often witnessed this), and then torn apart dead. This may be an ugly sight, but it cannot be cruel.
Last year, the Parliamentary Counsel, Daniel Greenberg, gave a striking lecture to the Surtees Society. In drafting the Hunting Act he had found, “for the first time in my immediate professional experience, the mechanism of the law was being deployed not to further some public policy objective but to inflict on the whole country the personal moral perspective of the 600 or so citizens who happened to find themselves in the House of Commons.” One may reluctantly obey a law made in this way, but one cannot respect it.
On my hunting days, in particular, I think about Mr Greenberg’s words. In the time before the ban, reasonable tolerance of diversity existed. No one had to approve of hunting, but the law respected the rights of a minority which (unlike most of its opponents) knew what it was talking about.
Round the simple need to control the number of foxes, for their own good and that of livestock, had grown up for roughly three centuries a sport which involved intricate skills. The breeding and training of hounds developed deep and trusting relationships between human beings and animals. Country boys could become whippers-in, kennelmen, eventually huntsmen. There was work for vets, farriers, grooms, livery stables, saddlers, inns and so on. In some places, the very land – the hedges and the coverts – was shaped by hunting.
The sport provided something for rural people of all ages and classes (and, increasingly, for welcome urban incomers who enjoyed the fun). It worked. And in the process, it gave exercise, pleasure, company, adventure and even aesthetic beauty (I think of horn-blowing or hound music, of cub-hunting dawns in September) to lives usually deprived of such things.
It would still work, if only the law were a tool for animal welfare, not an act of spite. We love to enthuse about “community”, but so long as we keep the Hunting Act unreformed, I do not think we are thinking seriously about what the word means.
Credit: Source link
