British fox hunting

Factual Questions
1

Britain’s House of commons recently passes a bill outlawing fox hunting with dogs. The AP article is at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010117/aponline182654_001.htm

I don’t’ want to start a debate about new age morality or any of that stuff. But a speaker for groups opposed to the law said, “many urbanites do not understand the need to keep the animals’ numbers down.” Now, Britain’s more heavily populated than New York State, and we don’t have a fox problem here, or anywhere else in the USA that I know of. We definitely have a deer problem, but that’s another thread. So anyway, Is Britain really awash in wild foxes? I thought the foxes were bred in captivity, and released for the hunts anyway. Am I wrong? Would some of the posters from across the pond fill me in?

2

If this thread doesn’t become a Great Debate I’ll be very impressed. I’ll keep my opinions to myself until it does.

To answer at least one of your questions, foxes are not bred in captivity for the hunt. Hunters pursue wild foxes.

Straying into a more subjective area, Britain is not awash in wild foxes.

Note that the foxhunting Bill is unlikely to become law.

3

Foxes are pretty common in Britain, in both rural and suburban areas, and even in a few inner cities. Whether or not they are the major pest that the pro-hunting lobby claims, I don’t know. They seem to be advancing two arguments:

  1. hunting is necessary to control the fox population; and

  2. most of the time the fox gets away anyway.

Personally, I don’t see how you reconcile the two. Also, while the fox may be the enemy of the chicken or sheep farmer, he eats rabbits and birds which are the enemy of the arable farmer, so I suspect it’s a case of swings and roundabouts.

Here are two sites setting out the arguments:

The Countryside Alliance are pro-fox-hunting and argue that 243,000 foxes need to be “controlled” each year.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals argues that it is unnecessary and cruel.

The Government also held an independent inuquiry into hunting with dogs, which found that:

In other words, it failed to come up with its own conclusionas to whether it was necessary or not.

No, but there is something called drag hunting in which the hounds chase a sack of scent which is pulled along by a man on a horse. This has been suggested as a less cruel alternative to fox hunting for those who enjoy the sport.

BTW, the House of Commons hasn’t actually passed the Bill yet, it still has a couple of stages to go through in that House before it goes to the House of Lords, where it will probably die a death this time. The Government can then bring it back and force it through without the consent of the Lords in the next Session of Parilament, after a year has elapsed, so I wouldn’t expect to see it on the statute books before March 2002.

4

I would expect the ban to pass. Even in the US where hunting is common and accepted, you don’t use one animal [dog] to kill another [fox] for sport. Even using dogs to drive animals to hunters is not common, though it once was.

I will admit that with England’s gun laws, there may not be any better way to hunt foxes than with dogs.

5

You may expect that the bill should be passed, but the probability is that it will be defeated in the House of Lords. Whether it will eventually be passed depends on the composition of the next Parliament.

6

hibernicus,

Once the Bill has been rejected by the Lords, it can be passed in the following Session of Parliament a year later without their consent under the Parliament Act 1948.

The House of Commons has voted to ban hunting with dogs several times over the last ten years or so and given that the majority this time was well over 200 (out of a total of about 650), there would have to be massive changes in the composition of the House at the election for the Bill not to pass again. Given that most of the opponents of hunting are Labour MPs and most of the proponents are Tories (with certain exceptions in both cases), that would probably mean we’d have to have a Conservative government before the Bill failed to get through the Commons, and the bookies stopped taking bets on Labour victory in May several weeks ago.

starfish,

Different traditions, I expect. Hunting one animal with another (dog, ferret, falcon) is quite common in Europe. The sport, I understand, is in the skill required to follow the dogs on horseback over hedges and ditches and so on. Though personally I find it distasteful and it doesn’t appeal to me.

This is not to do with our gun laws: foxes and deer have been hunted with dogs for centuries, and the kind of guns used in game hunting (principally shotguns) are quite easy to get hold of. It’s handguns that have been banned.

7

I tend to drive quite a at night so perhaps my perspective is slightly different. I do see an awful lot of urban foxes. There are certainly more in suburban London than nearer the centre but London is a city in which most areas have at least some (usually) Victorian houses with large gardens. They are very numerous and are definitely getting more so.

As well as gardens, they also live beside the huge number of railway lines, alongside canals and that part of the tube that is not underground.

Why so many and why are the numbers increasing ? Black bin liners, sounds silly but that is the case. Also, they are now becoming increasingly at ease with humans. For a long time the only time I would have contact with them was when one would follow me home if I was walking late at night (they always follow on the other side of the road, no idea why) but last summer the group at the bottom of the garden came out to sunbathe while people were in the house. That’s a new phenomenon.

Never heard of any fox attacking a human unprovoked although they do get into territorial battle with cats and that tends to be incredibly noisy in the stillness of the night. Wouldn’t characterise them as a ‘problem’ in the city but at this rate they will become an issue if only because of the potential to carry disease (I’m not sure about that personally but …)

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the proposed ban on fox hunting.

8

Fox hunting as a method of controlling fox numbers is pretty poor.

Most of the time the fox gets away but the argument used by the fox hunting lobby is that it is necessary to control their numbers, few holes in that I would think.

In fact our countryside has grown up around fox hunting, with hedgerow management techniques and woodland management designed to encourage settlement by foxes, you can often see stands of trees isolated in fields whose whole purpose in life, apart from drainage, was to provide cover for foxes.This has been estabished practice for centuries.

This rather demolishes the argument about controlling fox numbers, in fact the Leicestershire hunt was recently disciplined when video footage revealed that fox cubs had been kept in captivity by hunt employees for the purpose of release during hunt meets.Such animals would not have the wild survival instincts to shake off their pursuers but are good for ‘sport’.

So what we have is a bunch of folk saying they must be killed for the good of the countryside since they are regareded as vermin in some quarters and yet those very same people pratice land husbandry in a way to encourage and shelter them.

Forget the politics something is dishonest here.

Now if pro-hunt supporters were to say “Hey this is fun and we manage the environment in a sustainable way to keep our sport alive” then I could see their point of view - even if I disagree but at least it would be consistant but when they put forward this ‘pest control’ argument as justification I lose any empathy with them.

The hunt supporters will mention that huge numbers of jobs are at risk if hunting stops, or that hound packs have to be destroyed.
The number of jobs lost are hugely exagerrated but as for the dogs, again the pack owners have been captureds on video disposing of hound deemed to be of no further use.
The simply get a bunch of them out from their quarters, tie their leads and shoot them in full sight of other dogs due for the same treatment.(Liecestershire hunt again)

Hunt dogs do not live to a ripe old age.Hunt dogs are working dogs and are disposed of once their usefulness has passed.

There is a very strong class struggle embodied in this debate, working class sports such as Bear-baiting, bull-baiting, Cock-fighting, dog-fighting and there are more, were classified as cruel and barbaric and as such were banned but the blood sports of the inherited and titled wealthy such as stag hunts with dogs and fox hunting were not, simply because these were the pastimes of the enfranchised and poweful landowners.

It is no coincidence that the most vehement supporters of this sport are those who hold positions of undemocratic and unelected power.

9

“Even using dogs to drive animals to hunters is not common, though it once was.”

There are many ways to hunt but in my experience most hunters in the US use dogs for rabbit, ‘coon, quail, coyote, and pheasant hunting (I’m sure I’m missing some). For birds the dogs just point. For rabbits they drive the bunnies out of the brush, for racoons they drive them up trees, and for coyotes teams of dogs surround them (more or less). Do British hunters really let the dogs kill the foxes? What’s the fun in that? I like dogs to scare up the game but I prefer to do the killin’ myself.

“I’m not really a redneck I just write that way”

10

Phorester

I’m sorry to tell you that, yes, our huntsmen use their dogs directly to kill the fox.

They claim that death is instantaneous, well apart from runing the animal to exhaustion, this is not true and for the very first time that I can recall, yesterday, a hunt master acknowledged this.

The hunt supporters say that it is all about the thrill of riding horses over unknown ground, the chase and that the kill is of secondary importance.

Fine, why not use drag hunts more, where a heavily scented cloth is dragged along a predertermined route.
This is already done, there is much less chance of dogs running into danger such as railway lines of causing hazards on the road(I’m not making this up it really happens), damaging private property and having valuable horses damaged, and so destroyed, by riders attempting unrealistic jumps.

So you might wonder what the need is to kill an animal at the end.

I saw a documentary about hunts which was supposed to be favourable to the hunt. One of the last scenes had the master of the hunt holding up the dead and ripped apart fox aloft.There was a girl of around 12 or 13 there who was the daughter of one of the hunt members and the master smeared some of the fox blodod onto eithe of her cheeks.Aparrently this too is a tradition, a rite of ‘blooding’ a new member, something seems amiss here, there was no respect at all for the fox.

Dogs were also used in packs to kill deer and any pretence that death is instantaneous on such a large animal like a red deer stag are just obscene.

The hunts fought long and hard to defend this using all the same arguments such as ‘We countryfolk understand thiNGs you city types don’t’, animal welfare, natural selection and all the rest.

The good old video camcorder soon provided proof and this type of hunting has been banned.
There

11

Thank you all. This was very interesting. It appears then, that Britain has a very large fox population, on purpose, much like deer here. Foxes there fill a niche filled here by raccoons, weasels and coyotes, as well as foxes.

Would any of you suburban Englanders be interested in a bear-proof dumpster?

Ruth

12

Hunting is part of the British tradition.

Members of the aristocracy and royal family strongly support fox hunting, it serves the same purpose as ( very hard ) rugy at top public schools.

It is there to remind the upper classes of the brutish and nasty ruthless things that are some times required to 1. defend the relm and 2. keep the poor down.

If you think someone from a rough part of new york is tough then you have never met ex-public school royal marines.