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 Tomorrow hunting is banned 
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Boss Gobbler

Joined: Fri Dec 03, 2004 10:59 pm
Posts: 2851
Location: Roanoke
Post Tomorrow hunting is banned
Tomorrow, hunting will be banned in England and Wales. This is not the moment to enter, yet again, the arguments that have raged since Labour first started the process in 1997. It is a moment to consider what we are losing.

What we are not losing is cruelty to animals. The central untruth of the antis, repeated incessantly, is that the fox "is torn apart alive". It is torn apart dead. The quarry – fox, hare, deer, mink – often escapes, but is virtually never wounded.

When caught by hounds, it dies within seconds. (In the case of the deer, it is not killed by hounds but shot at point-blank range.) Because of the ban, more foxes will be wounded by shooting and snaring. More will die, too. In the last season before the hunting ban in Scotland, 500 foxes died. In the first season in which hunts were forced to use guns instead of hounds to kill their quarry, 900 died.

But we are losing something deep. A thread has been cut that goes back to our earliest ancestors. One of the anthropological definitions of man, as opposed to his evolutionary predecessors, is that he engaged in communal hunting. Now such an engagement is forbidden.

The thread runs through our history, too. It is part of the tapestry of the country's past – often literally so, since hunting is a favourite subject of tapestry. A pursuit loved by most of our monarchs, by Winston Churchill and the Duke of Wellington, by Anthony Trollope and Siegfried Sassoon, by Friedrich Engels, Mr Jorrocks, Squire Western, Uncle Matthew and all, is suppressed. The scenes on table mat, sporting print, inn sign and Christmas card depict what is now to be a criminal activity. It is as if Christmas itself – plum pudding and party hat, charades and tree – had been placed under the stern eye of the magistrate.

Indeed, this is exactly what did happen the last time England was ruled by Puritans – in the middle of the 17th century, when Christmas and hunting both incurred official disfavour. We are losing, among other things, our sense of humour.

Hunting reminds us of the triple meaning of the word "country". To hunting people, it means the area in which you hunt, as in "the Quorn country". To all of us it means the countryside – the green and brown of England. It also means our nation, as "I vow to thee, my country".

The three are linked. In the obituaries of old soldiers that often appear in this newspaper, the hero typically wins an MC in Italy or Normandy or Burma. Towards the end of the obituary, there are a couple of short paragraphs about what he did for the next 60 years. Often it says something like, "he farmed in Loamshire, was a church warden and a member of the county council. He hunted for 30 seasons with the United Loamshire Foxhounds."

Hunting people are patriots, and hunting is a characteristically British activity. Now we are trashing a vigorous part of our culture and libelling our past.

In theory, this could be the right thing to do. Duelling, for instance, used to be part of the chivalrous sense of honour in England, but it was also murderous, unnecessary and tragic. One can look back on its splendours without wishing for its return. Couldn't the same be said for hunting?

No, because hunting exhibits so many values that are as important today as they have ever been, perhaps more so.

The first is conservation. A good hunting landscape is an environmentally balanced landscape. It avoids intensive agriculture. It has wide headlands, well kept hedges and untidy woods. Its approach to the species hunted is one of control, not extermination. The individual creatures killed tend to be those whose age and disease make them suited for death: hunting maintains a high quality in the population of the animals it hunts.

The second is right approach to domestic animals. Delightful as pets are, it is with working animals that human beings develop the most fruitful, instructive, profound relationship. The discovery of what man and horse can do together is truly astonishing, and this is even more true of man and hound.

It is a sentimental fallacy to speak of animals as feeling as we do. But anyone who has hunted knows just how happy a horse can be. And when you see hounds working through a covert or screaming after a fox, you witness their skill, their unity and their delight. For 250 years, they have been bred for this. Almost the saddest thought is that, if the ban works, their art will be lost and they must die (and no, it is not true that they can all just go drag hunting).

The third value is a human one. In our hunt, the oldest mounted member is 87. She has hunted with us for every season except one since 1923. The youngest members are the age she was when she began. In between are the teenagers, the middle-aged, the pensioners, the fat and thin, the rich and the poor, the nurse, the lawyer, the MP, the Cockney, who used as a boy to catch green buses out of London to find the hunts he had somehow heard of, the schoolgirl, the policeman, the builder, and, of course, the farmers.

These people are united across age and class and sex in what, in other circumstances, the Government would celebrate as a true community. They have no money motive in what they do. They share knowledge, horses, kit, hip flasks. They swap stories and jokes, they pick one another up off the floor. They inculcate manners in the young and foster their courage. They love what they do, so much happier than if they were slumped in front of the television.

When I think of them now, I traverse them in my mind's eye, like the camera in a western or a war film. There they are, laughing in their common adventure, caught for a moment in the frame, and now they must part, because people who deliberately refuse to inform themselves about what really happens in hunting hate them. What a blow to the British tradition of tolerance.

But it is wrong to speak of all this as past. After the Last Post, Reveille. The ban starts tomorrow. The day after will see the largest number of people ever to attend meets in this country, most of them mockingly following the outward form of an unworkable law. As we know from Dickens, the law can be an ass. An ass moves more slowly than a horse or hound.

I do not believe that this patent injustice can endure, though it may take five years to put right. Freedom cannot so easily be destroyed, though today its sound is faint, like that of a distant horn.

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opin ... inion.html

_________________
"What gets us jangly is the suddenness of everything. We hunt turkeys because we want to hear them gobble, watch them strut and all that, and we hunt them with shotguns because we want to be close to them when those things occur." - Jim Spencer


Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:19 pm
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King of Spring
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Joined: Fri Dec 03, 2004 1:33 pm
Posts: 3008
Location: Powhatan, VA
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What is this world coming too? I saw this on NBC news last night.. unbelievable.. we owe a lot of our hunting rights today our forefathers and the european immigrants that built this country.. and now they have banned it in their own country..

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RB

Take me Home Country Roads.


Fri Feb 18, 2005 6:16 pm
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