Hunting with Dogs

(Written 12/07/15)

I see a positive blizzard of posts on FB along the lines of "Save the poor fox, don't mess with the hunting law!" accompanied by snaps of cute foxes. You will not find me liking any of them, and here's why.

There are two things you have to understand about the Hunting with Dogs Act. 1) It is a perfect example of law made in haste being bad law, and 2) it has almost nothing to do with fox hunting.

Let me address the second point first. Hunting foxes in silly costumes on horseback with dogs running ahead to flush out the fox and keep it moving until it is exhausted and can be dispatched is still, regrettably, completely legal. All the Act did was to limit the number of dogs, and prevents the dogs killing the fox. The fox still suffers terribly, but is now shot.

As to the first point, the Act doesn't mention foxes - it simply refers to hunting "animals", presumably to cover hunting deer and particularly stags. However, nobody thought about the rabbits. They are a pest and not only damage crops, they eat grassland back to the roots. All those country folk arguing for a repeal of the Act - they're chicken farmers, right? Wrong. They're vegetable farmers who can't sell a cabbage, a cauli or a carrot to Tesco with a healthy rabbit bite out of it, let alone the debris left by rabbits in the asparagus field. They're also the cattle farmers whose cows have little fresh grass to eat because the pasture has turned to mud thanks to rabbits. Cows have to eat, obviously, so a lack of fresh grass has to be supplemented with expensive hay, driving up the price of beef.

There are many ways of controlling rabbits - setting snares, putting nets across all the exits of a warren except one, then putting a longdog into that one so that the warren population flees into the nets, "lamping" (catching a rabbit at night in the beam of a spotlight, then shooting it as it freezes) - but the very best way is to go for a walk across the fields with a dog or three.

A rabbit will break cover and run from a dog. It's daft, because if a dog met a rabbit doing rabbit stuff, it would give it a good sniff and carry on to the next interesting smell or BALL! BALL! GET IT! And yet, your rabbit will bolt - as will the dog/s.

Having been a party to walking dogs across fields with the intention of getting a few rabbits for the pot, I can confirm that dogs can run faster than rabbits. What's more, they dispatch them almost instantly, the jaws go round the rabbit's neck, the dog rolls and the neck is snapped. A properly-fed and trained dog does no more than that, allowing the owner to take the rabbit(s) home for skinning, butchering and eating. Cows wanting grass to eat and supermarket produce managers wanting unchewed veg give thanks to the dog owner and his faithful "SQUIRREL!" friends.

The Hunting with Dogs Act kept braying superior Hunts alive, and actually contributed to the fox overpopulation problem by them breeding their own foxes to be released in a specific location yet has criminalised working farmers and other country folk who try to control vermin rabbits with the most effective and humane end to their lives - dogs.

The Act needs to be reviewed, redrafted, debated again and made to affect the very thing it was intended to stop - the vile hunting of foxes by people on horseback who delight in an exhausted, cowed fox that is then torn apart by a trained pack of dogs.

If you like to eat chicken, you have to be for controlling foxes. If you like your veg, you have to be for controlling rabbits. If you enjoy, or celebrate their slaughter, though - or, worse, demand that other celebrants wear your nonsensical red coat uniform, then I truly don't want to know you.