Ban or no ban, fox hunting resumes

LONDON – On Saturday mornings in autumn, the English gentleman’s pleasure has long been to put on a bright red coat and ride out across the countryside on horseback, with a pack of friends in identical clothes at his side and a pack of hounds baying cheerfully ahead, chasing a friendless fox.

This weekend, thousands of men and women did it again, joining 200 hunts around the English countryside to mark the first Saturday of a new season. But this time there was a difference. Hunting foxes with hounds was banned by law in February.

Yet the new law is so full of loopholes that defiant huntsmen determined to ignore the ban were able to find ways of carrying on with their sport.

Under the 2004 Hunting Act, hounds may still chase a scent trail – a sport known as “drag hunting,” in which a participant runs ahead of the pack daubing the trail with artificial scent. Huntsmen insist that they cannot possibly know if a real fox crosses the drag-hunt’s trail and the hounds go after the fox instead of the artificial scent.

Hunts are permitted to chase foxes, as long as participants shoot them humanely at the kill. But what, huntsmen say, if the hounds get to the fox before the person with the gun?

Hounds also legally may flush a fox from cover if huntsmen are out with birds of prey, officially engaged in falconry. At least 50 hunts have taken up falconry since February. Peter Heaton, joint master of the Cheshire Forest Hunt – 36 riders and 31 hounds who went out Saturday with an 8-month-old Harris hawk called Alice – explained: “The hounds are not hunting, but they are flushing for the hawk to hunt. It is one of the ways we are testing the legislation.”

Some people always have been repelled by the pastime, which traditionally ended, if all went well, with the fox being ripped to pieces by the hounds. In the 19th century, the London wit and playwright Oscar Wilde memorably mocked fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.”

But no one actually tried to stop it happening until the current Labor Party government of Tony Blair came to power in 1997. His election manifesto contained a promise to his party’s traditional urban working-class voters (who always had been suspicious of aristocratic pleasures) as well as to the new middle-class voters it had begun to attract to do away with a sport often condemned for its cruelty to animals.

But getting a ban into law turned out to be more difficult than the government expected. Numerous protests and marches almost stopped the ban from becoming law.

Research published by the BBC in September showed that none of the 317 official hunts in England and Wales has disbanded.

The huntsmen’s blood is up as they scent victory in their battle against a law that has banned hunting on paper but failed to stop it in practice.