Fox Hunting

Apparently foxes are a pest, hunting is traditional and if we go gallivanting around in the country tearing them limb from limb everyone is happy. Bollocks.

I don’t consider myself to be a tree hugging, animal loving, eco-mentalist but some things stand out as being patently wrong. Fox hunting is one of them. And I don’t even mean the fact that people wish to hunt them, it’s the method in which they want to hunt. The proponents are not hunting these animals stealthily with rifles or poison, no, they’re talking about a large group of dogs (trained to kill) and a group of pretentious toffs on horseback. The whole lot of them will tear across the countryside, trespassing into private land, damaging property and chasing their quarry for miles before it is finally caught and savaged.

So, what’s the excuse for this barbaric behaviour in this day and age? It’s a 500 year old tradition. So was chopping people’s head off but we eventually saw better of that and changed the way we dealt with things. It’s a really poor excuse and yet seems to be the one that every supporter wheels out. It used to be tradition to burn witches too, but I note that David Copperfield never seems to get any grief.

What’s next? Oh yes, the vermin argument. Foxes are a pest to farmers and need to be controlled. Forget that nature is proven to do this all by herself, let’s make man the decider of the fates of all species shall we? Foxes play a role in the population control of other animals, such as rabbits, moles etc but this seems to be glossed over. I’m sure farmers love a big family of moles messing up their fields. Anyway, let say they’re right – foxes are a pest and their population needs controlling. Don’t we normally do that with poison or disease? After all we used Myxomatosis to try and control the aforementioned rabbits. Maybe if we hadn’t killed all the foxes we needn’t have bothered. If you really want the sport element, take a rifle and stake them out. At least when you shoot one there’s a better chance of a quick death and you won’t have run a pack of dogs and horses across someone’s back garden.

So what other excuses do they have? Oh yes, employment. Think of all the job losses! Again, the absurdity is astounding. So the fact that a practice provides employment makes a justifiable excuse for its existence? Well in that case if we re-introduced some old-school Roman gladiator schools and amphitheaters we’d create loads of jobs. We could even use unemployed people as the gladiators; everyone’s a winner!

No, in reality there is no place for fox hunting and not one reason I've heard comes close to convincing me otherwise. It’s an excuse for ostentatious upper class aristocrats to dress like nineteenth century military officers and prance about on horseback, supposedly charging into battle. Grow up.