Lockdown Exemptions Shine A Light On The Brutal Reality Of Foxhunting
It’s a near-unparalleled high, an exhilarating rush, when you’re listening to the hounds and the huntsman in order to work out if the hounds have picked up a trail — Archie Winnington–Ingram, Author and Fox Hunter.
It can be oddly refreshing when a fox hunter is at least honest about the thrill of the chase instead of citing a slapdash inventory of societal inducements, be it animal population control, human socialising, or dog training. Manifold justifications are invariably offered, yet always omitting the sheer intoxication many hunters feel at chasing a helpless animal in an undisputedly asymmetric battle.
The matter of blood sport has received new life despite the government’s “rule of six” guidelines. The rules, published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, contains notable and concerning caveats for hunting and shooting; exceptions reportedly delayed due to an internal government dispute.
Sir Roget Gale, founding member of Conservative Animal Welfare, recently made the following statement on this anomaly.
I find it absurd that while restrictions are placed upon public gatherings including most sporting events, including horseracing, and that while gatherings of more than six people even within a family are prohibited., it is apparently in order to assemble in large groups to hunt and to go out to shoot mostly hand-reared wild birds. Do hunters and shooters not catch or transmit Covid 19?
The suggestion that this exemption is merely to placate high-paying Tory donors who enjoy these activities is highly probable. When factoring in the early opening of golf courses and car show rooms as part of the UK’s initial lockdown easing, the stark class bias appears at first comical. But all levity fades when considering the deaths directly attributable to lockdown, whether those be the result of the disturbing increase in suicides or hospital and care-home patients being denied vital treatment.
The desperate claim that hunting is Covid-safe because it is an outdoor activity jars with Gale’s observation about horse racing, itself clearly no indoor matter. Not to mention, the rhetoric guiding the proliferation of blood sport is often centered around its social camaraderie; the post-hunt back slapping over a bottle of port, for instance.
Surely, the most insincere of all hunt advocates are those who care little about the activity itself. These supporters may, in fact, never engage in fox hunting themselves, but instead employ the topic as a catalyst to antagonise their political nemeses, typecasting animal welfare proponents as left-wing virtue signallers. Yet these arguments fall short when considering the politics of some of the most outspoken animal rights advocates of today, including Bridgett Bardot and Morrisey.
The truth is that these libertarian admonitions to recoil from sentimentality in favour of robustness belies a disturbing political ethos wherein protecting wildlife equates to a hatred for human progress. and a desire to be at the mercy of a brutal and unforgiving Mother Nature.
The comedic icon Spike Milligan, hardly known for playing to politically correct sensibilities, once declared to fox hunters from the set of the television programme “Room 101”: If you’re watching tonight, you’re a lot of bastards. Milligan makes a succinct and appropriately emotive case here, but to expand upon his colloquialism, consider the following:
A financial claim frequently alluded to by hunting proponents is that damage to livestock by foxes impacts the UK at a cost of approximately ten to twelve million pounds annually. However, like most of the new rules surrounding Covid 19, the overall picture is conveniently obscured. In actuality, foxes save farmers roughly seven to nine million pounds a year by controlling the rabbit population and, in turn, protecting forestry by predating species which damage young trees. What naturally exists, therefore, before the intrusion of the hunt, is a zero-sum game.
Furthermore, the RSPCA maintains that instead of controlling the fox population, some hunts even encourage foxes to live and breed by building artificial habitats and putting food down to make sure there are enough of them to be hunted.
Underlying the economic and environmental impact of the hunt, however, is, of course, the blatant cruelty. Numerous autopsies have shown that foxes are not killed instantly but endure bites and tears to their flanks and hindquarters, causing them agonising torment before death.
Far from pursuing old, diseased and injured foxes, cubbing is exactly what it sounds like except patrons of the hunt prefer the term, ‘Autumn Hunting’ or ‘Hound Exercise’; A hunt surrounds a wood and the young hounds are sent in to drag out the cubs. If they escape, the hunters shout and smack their riding boots with whips to frighten them back inside. The vixen will try to defend her cubs leading to a vicious dog fight.
As troubling as the continuation of the hunt is, it should come as no surprise that it bears the blessing of Number 10. In a 2015 article, Boris Johnson equated fox hunting to skiing and described experiencing a “semi-sexual relation with the horse” in the process. An allusion might be made here to the fagging tradition of the public-school system in which displays of dominance and submission are encouraged and standardised at the institutional level. These themes learned in childhood by the Etonian elite often reappear on the political stage and, indeed, such may be the case with the Covid-secure blessing awarded to the hunt.
Of more interest now, though, is that along with the pandemic pandemonium, this year has also created the time and space to ask some longstanding questions about what it is to be a human being and how that humanity is reflected in our understanding and treatment of Mother Nature.
Citations
https://www.rspca.org.uk/getinvolved/campaign/hunting/facts
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/people/do-we-really-need-to-control-foxes-in-the-
