How people are still getting away with hunting foxes.
In November 2004, after a months-long period of protests, political manoeuvring and the threat of serious civil unrest, Commons Speaker Michael Martin invoked the Parliament Act to push into law a total ban on fox hunting in Britain. The Hunting Act – maligned both by animal rights activists and hunting advocacy groups – made the practice of deliberately hunting foxes with dogs illegal, effectively ending a tradition in England and Wales lasting almost seven centuries.
Outraged and indignant, pro-hunt supporters at the time promised a campaign of opposition both on the ground and in the courts. A 1,000-strong demonstration marched on Windsor Castle the day after the vote was held, as Tony Blair enjoyed an audience with the Queen alongside the then-French president Jacques Chirac. The Countryside Alliance promised to challenge the legality of the Parliament Act as soon as the ban gained royal assent. In an unequivocal call for mass legal disobedience, Tory rural affairs spokesman James Gray told the countryside: “Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war.”
His words may not have gone unheeded.
Since the ban was put into effect, hunting groups have continued to operate on certain conditions. Commonly, trails are pre-determined by laying a scent out for hounds to follow beforehand. According to the Countryside Alliance, hounds are stopped the moment it becomes clear they are no longer following the pre-laid scent. But animal welfare campaigners have warned that “trail hunting”, as the practice has come to be known, is largely a guise for groups to flout the Hunting Act, and exploit weaknesses within the law to carry on hunting foxes for real.
“Trail hunting is an invention of the hunts since the ban in 2004,” says Nick Weston, Head of Campaigns for the League Against Cruel Sports. “The hounds are trained to chase fox scents, so by extension, they’re still trained to chase foxes.”
Although trails are laid before a hunt, they’re often done so in a direction towards where foxes are likely to be found. According to Nick, the only person who knows the trail is usually the layer itself. This means that hounds can deviate without the hunt master ever knowing, which not only creates a recipe for disaster, but plausible deniability as well.
“This brings us back to the law, and the deliberate hunting of the fox,” Nick says. “[Huntsmen] can essentially claim any chase was an accident, that they lost control of the hounds, or that they had no idea the fox was there.”
Though it claims to operate under a similar non-lethal premise, campaigners say trail hunting is entirely different to drag hunting, a 100-year-old equestrian sport in which hounds are trained to follow a non-animal scent pulled by a drag, away from areas commonly inhabited by foxes.
Today, almost 200 foxhound packs continue to operate in England, Scotland and Wales. Some 45,000 people regularly participate in hunts. According to a Freedom of Information request from 2017, 677 people were charged for hunting a wild mammal with dogs from 2005-2016. But since 2013, the number of arrests made per year for hunting with dogs has halved – and activists believe blood-sport is still very much alive.
“It hasn’t really slowed down at all, to be honest,” says Jamie*, a 34-year-old hunt saboteur based in West Yorkshire. “I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and it’s been more or less steady since I started.”
Hunt saboteurs – “sabs” to supporters and detractors alike – work directly in the field to protect wildlife from being killed by hunting groups. Decked out in black jackets and balaclavas, and armed with whips and sprays, many sabs resemble stereotypes of anarchists. But sabs see themselves as the first line of defence against illegal hunts – not least because police authorities in the countryside are reluctant to enforce the law.
“Fact of the matter is, we have to be there because the police see illegal hunting as something that’s not important,” Jamie says. “You can get hurt coming up against packs of dogs and hunters, even though obviously a lot of sab stuff involves laying fake trails and the like. You’re putting yourself in harm’s way, but otherwise who’s going to stop them?”
Police forces have said on a number of occasions enforcing the hunting ban is a low priority issue. Immediately after the Hunting Act gained royal assent in 2005, the Association of Chief Police Officers published internal documents admitting the ban had “not been afforded high priority in the National Policing Plan”. In 2009, the ACPO argued there were more pressing matters because gathering evidence of illegal hunting is difficult. As recently as 2017, residents in the Lake District were found to have lost confidence in the willingness of police to tackle fox hunting, despite it being a pressing issue in the region.
Because the Hunting Act only protects against the deliberate hunting of foxes with dogs, campaigners have argued for a number of amendments to make the legislation airtight. In addition to an expansion of sentencing powers, and making employers and landowners vicariously liable for hunting offences, anti-hunting groups have also called for a ‘recklessness’ clause to be inserted to stop offenders using trail hunting as an alibi.
“You might be able to get away with saying that you killed that fox by accident,” Nick says. “But at the same time if you’re taking a pack of dogs that are trained to chase foxes out into the countryside, where foxes are, you can quite comfortably call that reckless behaviour.” The addition of a clause to cover these instances, according to Nick, would make it far easier for advocacy groups to prosecute offenders.
It isn’t just amendments to the Hunting Act campaigners are fighting for – it’s also the survival of the law itself. In the last General Election, the Conservative Party made a (recently abandoned) manifesto commitment to repeal the ban on fox hunting.
Theresa May said she had “always been in favour of fox hunting” when asked at a campaign event in 2017 why she supports repeal. In the four General Elections that have passed since 2005, every single Conservative manifesto has pledged to give Parliament a free vote on overturning the ban. But despite the persistence of the Tories to push for a free vote, Nick believes a majority of Conservative backbenchers would rather see the Hunting Act remain in law.
“I don’t think support for repeal is as widespread as the Tory Party would have us believe,” he says. “We’ve been keeping an eye on Conservative voters and MPs to see this idea a Tory majority would swing it, and for quite a few years now it’s not really been the case.” Nick says the tendency for Tories on the front bench to support fox hunting is likely the reason the issue keeps finding its way onto the pages of the party’s manifestos – and the data suggests he could be right.
An analysis of Ipsos MORI polling data since 2005 carried out by CTRL ALT shows that, barring 2006 and 2011, for which no data is available, public support for keeping the ban on fox hunting has either increased or remained the same every year since the Hunting Act became law. Since 2013, at least 80% of Britons have supported keeping the ban. A CTRL ALT survey of 103 people found 90% of respondents believed fox hunting should remain illegal. Of all the possible explanations as to why repealing the Hunting Act keeps appearing in Tory manifestos, widespread public support doesn’t appear to be one.
The consensus of public opinion on the Hunting Act might convince some that concerns about fox hunting today are overblown. For 23-year-old Sophie Bee, a keen horse rider and trail hunter from Scunthorpe, the hostility towards hunters stems from misinformation, miseducation and longstanding prejudices of a class nature.
“The amount of abuse people get about hunting, even trail hunting, because busybodies and sabs say we’re fox hunting is unreal,” Sophie says. “It’s no longer a case of animal welfare, it’s a case of class war. They think we’re all murdering psychopathic toffs because we have horses and obviously that means we have money. But that’s just not the case.”
Sophie says it isn’t uncommon for sabs to resort to tactics that endanger the horses and hounds, departing markedly from an ostensible support for animal welfare. “They’ll happily scare horses and drag hounds off the scent to near roads, and then wonder why they get hit.”
It’s no secret concerns about animal welfare can degenerate into bitter class divides in the instance of hunting. The Hunt Saboteurs Association’s own tactics guide claims the police do not think the law is an issue if broken by “someone on horseback dressed in red”. But amid the noise are real concerns about legal loopholes that can still be exploited to allow for the unjust killing of wildlife. Hunter or not, it’s difficult to argue why the law shouldn’t be amended to fix that.
*James’ name has been changed
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