From CS Jarvis's Three Deserts, John Murray 1936

'...luckily the English farmer is conservative and a very good fellow into the bargain and he is willing to put up with a lot to uphold a sport that he regards as a relic of the good old days, even though he can no longer afford to follow hounds himself. If, however, the hunting fraternity continue to drum into his ears this consummate rot about his livelihood depending on the sport, he may turn nasty, for the English farmer is not a fool and he hates "bunk" as much as most people... A very good case can be made out for fox-hunting without having recourse to these old worn-out fables. It is a fine, healthy sport and upward of two hundred people obtain amusement and exercise at every meet; the horses enjoy it; the hounds enjoy it; it keeps open a large number of country houses that might possibly be shut up; it causes a considerable sum of money to be spent in England which might otherwise find its way abroad — and the victim who supplies the fun is merely a bloody-minded little ruffian who will kill out of sheer devilment ten times the number of poultry he proposes to eat. One cannot feel the same sympathy for a fox that one feels for a partridge or a stag — but at the same time there is no need to be an utter damned fool about it and give tongue to that masterpiece of inanity i.e. "The fox enjoys it as much as anyone."

We will:

We will set up a compulsory national dog line registration scheme.

Richard Ingrams, The Observer, 25 June 2000

'... there seems to be general agreement that soccer hooliganism is very much a product of the English psyche. Is it something of which we can be proud? Possibly... That great authority on Englishness, Mr Jeremy Paxman, has reminded us that football hooliganism has a long and distinguished tradition in our island story. When I compiled my own anthology on England I included the observation of a French visionary, Cesare de Saussure, who in 1785 wrote of football louts: "They will knock you down without the slightest compunction. On the contrary, they will roar with laughter." The hunting lobby could take a lesson from all this. They should drop all the pseudo-ecological talk about how fox hunts are helping to preserve a balance in the countryside, as well as preserving a useful means of employment to thousands of people. Better perhaps to promote themselves as preserving an ancient tradition of savagery and violence in common with our age-old soccer hooligans.'

Lt–Col Nick Hornby of the RA Hunt, quoted in an article in the Independent by Jane Hughes on restricting access to the countryside:

'EVERYBODY IS OK REALLY, IT IS ONLY A POLITICAL THING.'

And so it was that on Good Friday we collected her and brought her home from Wimbledon...not the cuddly puppy four or five months old that I thought I had seen, but one of a year or so and more or less full grown - puppyish and puppy plump, I grant, but four feet long from the point of her nose to the root of her tail, and 18 inches more of that with which to sweep things from low tables. I could not believe that I had been so mistaken... Last week the Mayhew [dog rescue home] rang to ask how we were getting on - "Fine," I said, "but why do you ask?". "Oh, came the answer, "we thought she might have behavioural problems." "No, no - it is I who have those," I replied, glancing through the window to see her wrestling with the hosepipe as though she were the infant Hercules strangling serpents..."

Kipling put it too cooly with his "Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware of giving your heart to a dog to tear."

The Burns Inquiry

• Professor Michael Winter went on hunts as a child and has as an adult;
• Lord Soulsby [a vet] of Swaffham Prior offered his services 'free' to the British Field Sports Society, where he tried to counter an academic study showing cruelty suffered by deer being hunted;
• Sir John Marsh is governor of the Royal Agricultural College which owns a beagle hunt;
• Winter, Soulsby and Marsh have attended meetings run by the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance and accepted their hospitality.

7 July 2000

Editor

So agriculture minister Nick Brown insists that the badger cull must go on in the name of 'science'. Oh Mr Brown, are you quite sure you know what brand of fire you are playing with? No political ministry in history has a record to compare with MAFF's when it comes to the wanton waste of public money.

Mr Brown looks perplexed when he is interviewed, and no wonder. If a reporter or interviewer were to ask him what use MAFF had made of the results of the badger cull it has carried out over the past 25 years, he would be hard pressed to find an answer, unless of course the whole thing was an elaborate and unexplained jape. He would probably stick to his story that it was 'all about science', which is as convincing as the notion that politics is all about neighbourly love. I have to tell this amiable politician that all the real scientists, or at any rate honest seekers after the truth, in his department left its employment years ago in the days when MAFF was testing our river waters and finding 'no evidence of pollution' from sewage or farm effluents. They refused to be turned into intellectual slaves by a gang of civil servants masquerading as scientists who were prepared to promote any cause put up by their political masters and then claim that it was 'all about science'. I can tell Mr Brown what he wants to know without the need to spend another penny.

Yes, badgers do carry TB. We know that. So do cows. So do rabbits, birds and humans. Who gives it to whom or which is entirely academic. Just suppose they find out that cows give it to badgers, what good will that do? Or the other way round. MAFF's alleged scientists have already chalked up the distinction of creating a massive gap in the natural food chain by breeding and spreading myxomatosis in rabbits, so that the earth's crust is permanently infected by a foreign and ineradicable organism and many mammals and birds are deprived of a normal diet. Now, if past form is anything to go by, it is on the verge of recommending the elimination of the badger species. Doubtless it has a suitably unnatural method in mind. And suppose they find the pigeon or the sparrow responsible? Shall we have an officially sponsored campaign to rid the world of birds? A more relevant question perhaps is 'Can we any longer afford MAFF?'. A small committee of Sixth formers would be much more realistic - and effective. HVFW

16 October 1999

Editor

'Give me a child…'

The unholy broth of 'friends of natural freedom' and 'enemies of minorities', the deceptive labelling of liberal thought as 'libertarianism', the special pleading for birth control, abortion, hunting and child discipline, all wrapped up in a neat plea for freedom for smokers, poachers, teachers, parents, country dwellers, etc, etc, are well–recognised ploys to those of us who can perfectly understand the force of Kant's statement of the obvious without wanting to inflict gratuitous beatings on children, dogs or foxes. Those of us who abhor cruelty, whether directed at humans or pets or wild animals, on the principal ground that it diminishes human dignity as surely as it causes unnecessary suffering, feel no need to justify our position. Had Mark Daniel been born into an earlier part of the present century he would have been able to include women along with animals in defence of Kant's thesis that only those who can exercise responsibility can have 'rights'. It was the very argument by which they were refused property rights and the vote. I very much doubt whether the Catholic church was prominent in its support for their cause.

But it is his support of the Catholic Church's stance in the particular case of the 12–year–old girl of Catholic parentage, his insistence on the church's 'compassion' (a word that would surely stick in his throat if used by opponents of hunting), and the idea that the 'woman's right to choose' is a 'supposed right', that brings Mark Daniel's argument into its most sinister perspective.

He may be a 'poor and irregular churchgoer', as far as I am concerned he is perfectly entitled to support the church in any outlandish position it cares to take up and to adopt whatever moral high tone he likes, but neither he nor the Pope is entitled to deny a woman the right to decide whether or not she conceives or gives birth to a child for which she cannot provide shelter or food. Neither are they entitled, by electing themselves the arbiters of 'What's Right', to foist their morality on those of us who do not share their faith, and who in any case prefer the humanism of Voltaire and Darwin to the dogma of Rome. HVFW

Dear Editor

May I introduce myself? My name is Bertie, I am about nine months old (or so my woman says) and I am an orphan – well, I was an orphan but now I'm part of a terrific family so I suppose you would say I was adopted – Life is great fun and I seem to be the life and soul of the party (or so my woman says), so I get very despondent when I try to share my joy with others of my kind, especially when my would–be friends are pulled away by their owners and told off for pulling in my direction and even given a real dressing down for daring to talk to me as if I was some sort of hooligan – Even worse than that, I saw one of my fellows being dragged along the road on the end of a chain while he tried to – what's the word? – perform, and his woman kept pulling and pulling and when despite everything he succeeded, the owner pretended it hadn't happened, which isn't nice for people is it? – So what I am asking is whether you could help me to find a few nice friends?

What would help enormously would be a word in the ear of the others' men and women – they just don't seem to understand my language. What I try to tell them is that the creatures they take for walks are not elephants or lions or tigers or savages – they are playmates like me who want a bit of fun and want their men and women to have fun too. They don't have to keep struggling with them or talking to them in human speak or throwing balls to them. When they get into open spaces they can be like my woman and take them off their leads and let them mix – that's what that nice dog warden man calls socialising and we love socialising and we hardly ever fight, unless one of our men puts a ball or a toy in our midst and then there's sure to be one of our lot who's been taught human tricks like refusing to share, so there's sometimes trouble. But otherwise, once we have marked out our territorial walkies, you know what I mean, we are happy to be off our leads and allowed to mix with our own kind and make friends and leave our humans to make friends and have a good time too. So I wonder if you would be kind enough to tell the other men and women that I would really like to make friends with their creatures – and my woman says she would love to see them relax and to talk to each other while I and their creatures have fun so that life in the park or along the riverbank or on the seashore is not so much of a struggle, more a daily pleasure.

Hope you don't mind me writing to you like this.

Yours very sincerely

PS I've asked my woman to give you her name and address, just in case you should think I am not bona fido, as you might say. She is Mrs Virginia Barton of Bideford.

A correspondent argued that the hunting of higher mammals by dogs and armed humans is justified in nature by the conduct of the cat towards birds.

12 August 1999

Editor

17 Brest Road

Derriford

Plymouth PL6 5AA

Does the fact that my cat, artificially bred by man, attacks birds that are the legitimate creatures of bush and sky, make it right for me to attack deer, fox, hare and falcon with all the resources that higher intelligence places at my disposal?

Is it better to chase and kill the fox than the wild boar, to terrorise the deer with a pack of hounds and a screaming mob of humans than to hunt the otter almost to extinction? Does the country sport ethic embrace or reject badger baiting? Is it better or worse for pigeon fanciers to hunt the lord of the skies, the peregrine falcon, than for French and Italian peasants and priests to trap and kill millions of migratory larks and finches? Because adult humans beat their own children into insensibility, should we therefore ignore gratuitous cruelty to pet animals or wildlife? Is cruelty an inescapable facet of human nature, and if so should it be admitted to and institutionalised?

The questions are endless. Agreement on the most basic moral and ethical propositions seems to be beyond human wit.

Indeed, reading the rich quiltwork of argument and prejudice served up by contributors to Western Morning Views (Wednesday, Aug 11), I can’t help wondering if anyone ever notices, much less heeds, what others are saying.

It seems to be instinctive these days for the hunt protagonists to accuse everyone else of wilful ignorance. In fact, human ignorance seems to play as big a part as the wiles of the fox in bringing the John ‘Peel brigade to the boil. ‘A culture which allows itself to be governed by the ignorant’, says Mr Harris, ‘must surely be in serious trouble’. He of course refers to the anti-hunt campaign.

On another tack, Mrs DC Colombi is, I feel sure, referring to me when she speaks of ‘the correspondent who thought that point-to-points had no connection with hunting’. What I said was that there is life after hunting; that point-to-points like other country pursuits could easily be held after hunting was abolished. The rules could presumably be modified to allow people to jump and race their horses without first terrorising foxes. Or am I being simplistic?

Again, the very important case against organophosphates is being muddled by the farmers’ determination to stand by the hunters and the badger exterminators; ‘The fox may suffer for a very short time’, says Mr Dennis reassuringly, OP victims may suffer for ‘many years’. But at least they are beginning to recognise that MAFF is not the benevolent uncle they thought it was, and that the scientists who have told them that all is well might be wrong, just as they might have been wrong about insecticide sprays, protein-based cattle feeds, GM experiments and bovine TB.

The debate reflects sadly on our standards of conduct towards each other as well as towards the rest of nature. It benefits all the same from the occasional eccentricity. Where would be without the likes of Mr Harris’s wartime Major who used his hunting horn to make ‘every man jack of you run as fast as you can’, right through the enemy line? Yoiks, major, let’s gird the old loins and get at ‘em. What? HVFW

29 May 2000

Editor

Barnstaple

Another general election looms. Janet Kipling's letter ('Make Government deliver...' Journal 25 May), could prove a salutary warning to New Labour. Its various promises to introduce anti-hunt legislation could hardly be more specific or more authoritative. The Prime Minister has said without any ifs or buts, 'there will be a ban'. The Home Secretary has told MPs 'I will take your concerns to the Prime Minister'. It has all been recorded, admitted to, made into a testament of good faith.

Janet Kipling speaks for the RSPCA and with the great authority of that law enforcement agency. A letter alongside makes an even more telling comment on the Countryside Alliance's subtle promotion of' 'nasty pastimes'. Those of us who voted by the million for New Labour in the belief that it would honour its promises, however many hedonists took to the streets to plead their abominable cause, will wait with bated breath to learn of the response to the Burns report. If there is more procrastination, there will be only one course left open to us. Since the Conservative Party is not an option (though they at least are honest in their devotion to blood sports), and since the LibDems can't be trusted even to support their own party's published policies and promises, we will have to withhold our votes. Pity, but that threat may prove crucial indeed in concentrating minds in Whitehall. HVFW

The claim that 'in hunting the fox is either killed swiftly or goes free' is rubbish. You only have to look at the Burns inquiry website to see that of the foxes caught while Burns was present and taken away for postmortem, not one died quickly. The cause of death in all cases was severe trauma to internal organs and limbs, not the mythical bite to the back of the neck claimed by hunters. I welcome the day when this barbarity is banned so I and other anti-hunt riders aren't thought of as blood-lusting hunters when out riding...

I'm a retired farmer, and for a farmer to oppose hunting would mean social suicide; no more invitations to the Hunt Ball; no more generous compensation for claims of damage to crops and fences after the hunt has passed and blackballing from all the posh clubs. He would become an outcast...Foxes are easily controlled, but, of course, farmers dare not take these steps for fear of upsetting the hunting fraternity. There's little danger of the species being wiped out because this very clever animal is already seeking refuge in urban areas.

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