The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible (Foxhunting - is this sport?)

Member Name: steerpyke

Product:	Foxhunting - is this sport?
Date:	31/05/06 (347 review reads)
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“The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible” is how Oscar Wilde described the past time of fox hunting, and whilst Wilde's humour was ever based in rhetorical wit, his observation here is nothing less than accurate. Hunting has long been not only a tradition but also a necessity in times gone by, but there is some justification for hunting when the end result is a table to feed the household. But not only has the world moved on and the need to hunt for personal need is long gone, fox hunting was never about food anyway. Fox hunting has its beginnings in the Georgian landed gentry and was and to some degree still is a class-orientated activity. Whilst the people who make up the mechanics of the hunt may be working class, the kennel men, the tradesman, the various suppliers of goods and services, without the gentry and upper middle classes it would not endure. So if it is not comparable with more practical forms of hunting what is it about.

Participants will argue that it is a pest control. Foxes are vermin granted and do pray on farm stock, admitted and there are no easy solutions to the problem. Shooting is not an option as it relies on someone staying up every night to catch them in the act. Snaring is not an option as it is clearly inhumane and gassing is not a route that we want to go down again. Remember the effects on the rabbit population when this was used in the seventies and eighties, inventing and inflicting new diseases on the planet is not a way forward. But if none of these solutions are an alternative, does this mean that I’m advocating fox hunting. Absolutely not. Sheer economics are enough to show the stupidity of fox hunting. The upkeep of the hounds, the horses, the wages of the kennel staff and associated trades on one side hardly balances with the efficiency of the role as pest control that the hunts provide. The site of thirty equestrians and forty hounds chasing across the countryside in pursuit of, what’s effectively, a wild dog, is ludicrous to say the least. And if it is, as the participants will try to convince you, a sport, then when the fox has evaded the equivalent of a small village on horse back and finally goes to ground do they send in fox terriers to kill the animal in its den? Not very sporting really, is it?

Another argument against its role as a system of pest control is the active cultivation of the activity. From the earliest times the landscape has been modified to encourage the growth of the fox population. Trees were cut into small copses in the landscape to provide just the sort of isolated tree root haven that foxes make their home in. Even in the present day the Beaufort hunt was revealed to have been saving fox cubs to raise them and release back into the wild to ensure the survival and ultimately the longevity of their population. Doesn’t sound like pest control to me?

Another straw that is clutched in the defence of this strange activity is tradition. Maypoles are traditional, cheese rolling, Burns night, England getting knocked out of the world cup, all of these are rich traditions from the lands heritage. Fox Hunting can only be considered a tradition if it goes into the same category that we keep the likes of Bear Bating, The feudal system, Witch Burning and going to war with the French. Okay the last one still has some justification, but my point is that just because it’s a longstanding tradition, doesn’t mean that its something that is automatically for the betterment of the country. Lets re-introduce the Black Death; it used to be a grand tradition in the fourteenth century.

Lets go with the popular argument of; it’s a country activity. Long gone are the days when the country was peopled by landed gentry and their bonded servants. There is a homogenous mix of class, creed and colour through out the land these days. I was born in the country and lived there until my mid thirties and we are not all Countryside Alliance voting, green welly wearing, Labrador owning, Range Rover driving toffs. The countryside is not the sole jurisdiction of a few very vocal people that have inherited their money from rich ancestors. The amount of people that take part in hunts, work for hunts and make their living from hunts is a very, very small percentage of the countryside and in an age when business are, due to government neglect and managerial self interests, shedding jobs left, right and centre, then the potential loss of a few jobs in this sector is hardly big news.

Many will throw the old comparative sport argument. What about fishing, isn’t that just as brutal as hunting. I say yes, and just as pointless. But instead of the argument being used to support hunting it actually works against fishing.Spending hundreds of pounds on state of the art fishing equipment only to throw back the fish that you took four hours to catch seems a bit of a strange activity to me. Tell that to the pastoralists of central Africa or the Inuit people of the far north and they will be telling that joke around the campfires for generations to come.

In conclusion then, not only can I not find any justification for this past time of ripping animals to pieces with a pack of dogs, its hard to think of a more ludicrous site of a few dozen people with nothing better to do ripping up the country site in some sort of grotesque caricature of a Thelwel cartoon. And even though the banning of hunting is often banded about when the government want to win a few votes, it is an activity that needs to be kicked into history, where it belongs.

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