by Ian Moss
The traditional Boxing Day argument about fox hunting started yesterday morning. It’s a great argument because it happens every year, on the same day, and that day just happens to be a day when not much else is happening.
For the booze sodden, housebound, tired and emotional journalist it is the Christmas present that keeps giving. Every year just before you knock off for Christmas you can ask the prime minister’s official spokesman, “are you going to repeal the hunting ban?” The spokesman can say, “we have no plans to” and there you are – that’s your Boxing Day copy phoned in. It basically writes itself, with a quote from the League Against Cruel Sports, a quote from the Countryside Alliance, and it could probably be done by a fancy piece of sentence generating software knocking out 1000 words on the top line message of “people are in favour and people are against and here is a picture of a bloke on a horse”.
With fox hunting I always feel slightly disconnected from the debate, in that I don’t have the strong feelings against hunting that characterise people’s position in support of the ban. However, I am also convinced I don’t have any feelings at all in favour of hunting.
That’s where the cold, hard, rational logic kicks in for me. I can understand totally why people get very worked up against fox hunting. I don’t personally, but I can see why people do. What I can’t understand is why people get worked up in favour of hunting. Try as I might, once it has been pointed out that the pastime involves randomly picking on an animal to chase to have it ripped to death with dogs, I can’t see that as being something a decent person would get very involved in defending.
I have a relative by marriage that would never march for poverty, or unemployment, or war, but will march on London from Stoke on Trent to defend the right to kill foxes with dogs. That seems weird to me. Actually, all marching seems weird to me – I never quite saw the point of it and it was usually cold and often wet – but I digress. The thing is I find everything about hunting odd.
The clothes, the horns, the dogs, the killing all adds up to something I wouldn’t want to do. I even find the phrase, “ride with the hunt” rather curious. It infers some sort of passive activity that reveals a certain inner mania. “Well, I was all dressed up and sitting on my horse, trotting along and suddenly there was a hunt. So I thought, hey I’ll ride along with that”. Mainly I don’t think the phrase describes what is actually happening. It feels to me that you are not “riding with the hunt”, in fact you are part of the hunt.
I was in favour of the legislation when it came in, not an enthusiastic supporter but someone that saw it might be a reasonable thing to do. I figured those with strong feelings against hunting had a point and so we should get on and ban it and then spend some energy on more difficult questions of the day. Hunting to me is one of those things that once it has been said “you can’t do this anymore” I look at it and think “OK, I understand, you are probably right”.
I think that is basically how other people should view it – it’s wrong, so if you did do it, stop now and move on to something else. Get another hobby. Take up paintballing or polo or, if you need the blood lust, ride round your house on a scooter killing spiders. Even if you still like the dressing up and riding on a horse in a gang thing it is pretty easy not to break the law – just ride following a scent and lay off the fox-ripped-to-pieces section of the day.
