Jim Barrington: What a drag

Looking through some old hunting photographs, the similarity between the various types of packs is obvious, yet this fact may present a difficult hurdle for those intent on banning trail hunting.

The Labour Party manifesto states trail hunting will be banned, though when and how that might happen is anyone’s guess, given the many and varied problems the new government is currently facing.

Attending a drag hunt on the Welsh borders back in the 1980s when I was director of the League Against Cruel Sports, I was struck by the attitude of some anti-hunters who seemed to think this pack was hunting a live animal and not a pre-laid scent. The meet, however, looked exactly like a fox hunt in dress, riders and hounds, and while the antis got on with doing what antis do, I thought at the time it may just be an understandable mistake.

Later, while still with the LACS, I witnessed a bloodhound pack operating in the New Forest, though this time they had no such difficulties, probably due to meeting in a fairly remote part of the forest where the human runner laying the scent had plenty of hiding places. These were bloodhounds of the type wrongly linked to Sherlock Holmes when tracking a felon, (Holmes’ fictional dog, Toby, wasn’t a bloodhound, but described by Dr Watson as a spaniel/lurcher cross).

Not all bloodhound packs have the distinct appearance of the famously droopy-looking hound. Some packs, like the one I followed in Yorkshire years later after having left the LACS, use bloodhound/foxhound crosses. Once again, the hunt attracted a little bit of ‘anti attention’, presumably because the hounds looked very much like foxhounds.

To confuse the current situation even further, former foxhunts have now turned to hunting a pre-laid trail… or is perhaps a pack hunting legally using one of the numerous exemptions under the Hunting Act…or maybe it’s a hunt just out exercising. So-called breaches of the law reported by biased antis, or members of the public who are mainly ignorant of finer detail of the law, cannot be relied upon to produce sound evidence. Even the first day after the Hunting Act came into force in 2005 calls were made to the authorities when a hunt was spotted, the thinking being that all hunting with hounds was now banned and every hunt had closed down.

All this points to some of the obstacles politicians and later, of course, already stretched police forces, will have to overcome if a trail hunting ban is to be enacted. It could be that the whole process is simplified by a law that prevents an animal-based scent from being laid, thereby forcing hunts to train hounds to follow a different trail similar to that of the drag hunt. How police officers would be expected to ensure this happens is hard to imagine. Some hounds may take to a new scent, others may not.

But would this satisfy the extreme anti-hunting groups? I doubt it.

Those who gather, march and protest at parliament and elsewhere whenever hunting is on the political agenda, appear to be united and well-meaning, yet many of these people know little about the activity and even less about the detrimental consequences of a ban. In a sense, the vast majority of the public are deceived on two levels; the first being that a ban on the use of scenting hounds is good for wild animal welfare (it most definitely is not) and the second in being duped into supporting an ever more extreme animal rights agenda.

Were those antis who turned up at the drag hunt genuinely mistaken or were they more concerned about targeting the people involved? A cursory glance through statements and articles on websites of hunt saboteurs and animal liberationists show strong anarchist leanings, often combining a range of causes, as if somehow they all fit neatly together and are all perpetrated by the same type of human oppressor.

Are those who now disrupt trail hunts doing so because they truly believe these are smokescreens for live quarry hunting or does that confused class hatred still dominate?

The answer may lie in wider animal rights thinking, which has been encouraged and promoted over decades by certain figures and followed by the gullible who are happy to be ever more extreme in their beliefs and actions. Animals should not be ‘owned’ in this philosophy and, as one activist said in a letter to his local newspaper, if a dog wanders off that is the animal’s choice and should not be stopped. Few would see that as a sensible animal welfare strategy, but then again, the term ‘welfare’ is an anathema to the animal rightist, often quoting the ludicrous line: “If we had slave welfare, we’d still have slaves.”

Animals, they claim, should not be used in any way, even convincing the RSPCA at one time to adopt such a policy; meanwhile others go much further, arguing that even wild natural predation should be curtailed. In his book, Fettered Kingdoms, former LACS director John Bryant stated: “I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that pet animals should be completely phased out of existence.” Bryant’s view of people who ride horses is obscene and ridiculous in equal measure.

So there is your answer, any use of horse and hound is wrong in the eyes of pure animal rightists and consequently it doesn’t matter to them if hunts are following a trail, a drag, a human scent or just out exercising – they all have to go.