Population control, not extermination. There are too many foxes for the amount of land, so numbers have to be controlled. It’s a particular concern in areas with livestock, especially lambs and poultry. The high numbers are also a big problem for gamekeepers.
Personally, I think that the Hunting Bill was a collosal waste of time, and served only to make both sides (pro and anti hunting) look like raving loonies.
Also to claim that the countryside alliance protest was “peaceful” is a joke. They clashed with police and several were arrested for invading the House of Commons (amongst them Brian Ferry’s son).
Which can be much more efficiently accomplished with firearms than it can with packs of hounds. (I hunt foxes for feral pest control, but all the same I still have my ethics about the whole process.)
I dunno. The Hunts used to hunt the foxes for free (the landowner paid nothing for fox control), whilst pest control with rifles is expensive (in time and/or money). Also, shooting might not be as simple in English fields (from a safety point of view), especially the smaller ones with the hedgerows on the boundary.
The Hunts also tended to cull the sick and weak, leaving the healthier, fitter foxes behind (as they escaped), whereas any fox, fit or sick, is game for a rifle.
All that said, it’s probably more humane to shoot rather than trap.
I’m not sure how the logic here works; there are plenty of shooters (ie, myself and my hunting friends) who are only too glad to help a farmer out by shooting their foxes for free. We supply our own guns and ammunition and usually get the farmer a bottle or a carton of their preferred drink as a “thank you”.
You make a good point about the safety involved in shooting on smaller English properties, but I should mention that shotguns are designed for close-range work (the maximum range on a shotgun loaded with No. 4 shot is about 100 yards, and you’d be wasting your ammunition firing at anything more than 25 yards away) and as long as you observe basic firearm safety precautions (like not firing blindly into hedges without knowing what’s on the other side), I wouldn’t think it’s considerably more dangerous than having packs of dogs and people on horseback charging all over the place. As you say though, it depends on the property and the surrounding geography.
But “no true huntsman lets wounded prey die off in a corner” is, and so is “no true huntsman uses foxhounds”, since neither of those excludes one from being a hunter i.e. someone who kills game. In fact, I think you’ll find more than one dictionary considers mounted foxhound hunters the very epitome of huntsman. And I know for a fact that many people get liquoured up and go hunting, and don’t care whether they get clean kills at all.
They used the hounds to actually kill the foxes? That surprises me, in that I always thought that hounds were used (in any kind of hunt) to flush the animals out so that the hunter could then shoot them.
Yes. “Coursing” wasn’t the same as “hunting”. Coursing was often a question of actually providing hares to be run down. Hare-hunting was done with a pack of slow-running hounds followed on foot, and the objective was not to run it down too quickly. You know the word Harrier? That’s where it comes from (also, in English usage at least, a term for a cross-country athlete, or at any rate a name for a club).
“Population control” is possibly an oversimplification, given that it was far from unheard of for hunts to see to it that the fox population was kept at a level that ensured it would be necessary to hunt some more the following year (an approach you’d hardly take with an unglamorous quarry such as rats, for instance). And its efficiency is very much open to question; granted it was, as you might say, free at the point of use, since it wasn’t the farmers paying for the hunting, but if it was a question of foxes consuming valuable resources, I beg leave to doubt that the most voracious fox ever ate as much as the pack of hounds used to kill it.
I’m pleased to see that hunting after inanimate targets still goes on - it’s picturesque, and none should deny that. And it’s also pleasing to see that, after all, the foxhounds and horses haven’t been slaughtered in droves, and all the brush and other cover grubbed out to leave the countryside a featureless prairie… both of which were being loudly proclaimed in pro-hunting circles.
Are the hunts conducted on private land? I get that the riders could restrain the horses, but how do you keep the hounds off of other people’s property? I’d be mightily pissed if a pack of hound dogs came tearing through my yard, even more so if they were followed by a bunch of horses.
Difference is, the farmers aren’t paying for the hounds’ feed, the Hunt does as the cost of participating in the sport. A fox killed my friend’s dad’s ducks and geese, it got into the coop (or whatever it’s called) and just attacked them all. Worst thing is it didn’t even eat anything. The guy sat up for several nights with his rifle waiting for it to come back, he never got it though.
Contrary to how I may have come across above, I’m not actually pro-hunting, I really don’t care one way or the other. Part of me was sad because the people who protested Hunts (and even more so the saboteurs) are the same people who attack animal research centres and their staff (including a member of my family) and it annoys me when they get to claim any victory, no matter how small.
I know. I more or less said so. Point is, there’s no way the practice arose as a means of keeping down foxes to preserve essential food animals for humans. (There’s a bit in the first section of Stalky & Co. where M’Turk is outraged because he has just seen a gamekeeper shooting at a fox, which according to his country upbringing, Irish though it be, is contrary to all the rules of “preserving” - and the English Colonel who owns the land thoroughly agrees).
And the hunt would have killed whatever fox happened to be in the vicinity, whether it was the predator or not; or else missed it entirely.
There is some truth in that, although that’s not the whole story. There are and were plenty of opponents to hunting who were not “animal rights” activists, though it’s hardly surprising that you’d find the latter lining up with the former. And there were also people who wrote sniffy letters to the Daily Telegraph about those who were trying to ban hunting with “dogs”… dash it all, ran the implication, one hunts with hounds, not dogs, as though “He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” was any kind of an argument.
