Daft as a Brush...democracy and the hunt

It’s a 0630hrs crisp autumnal morning in the rural idyll of Garthorpe in the Leicestershire countryside. I’m bleary-eyed, sipping on Darjeeling. Since Fox News went off-air in the UK, I’m denied the early-morning entertainment of the angry American Alt-Right desperately justifying the ramblings of a tubby orange narcissist. The last I saw, he was demanding that Congress grant him a lolly, and a gold badge inscribed with ‘Greatest Ever President’. Now Fox is gone from our screens. I understand that Rupert Murdoch has been told that if wants to own more media in the UK, he needs to tone down the ‘God and Guns’ rhetoric. It apparently plays less well to blue-rinsed Conservative ladies-who-lunch on salads in Surrey, than it does to red-necked conservative gun-toters who gorge on grits in Georgia. I’ve had to make do with the BBC musings of Naga Munchetti, who has both a better golf handicap and a far better grasp of middle-eastern politics than Donald Trump, but still, it’s not the same.

An item on ‘The Brexit Debate’, by which I mean the bickering and career jockeying of various Cabinet members rather than negotiations between Britain and the European Union, is drowned out by the sound of horns and barking; the local hunt has arrived!

Scarlet-coated and steed-mounted, they unload around fifty pristine fox-hounds from a large horse-box. Although the hunt is simply exercising the dogs rather than chasing a fox, for some, this is an unsavoury reminder of past times, of what Oscar Wilde called ‘the unspeakable chasing the uneatable’. Others would claim it is a sad reminder that a timeless country-community activity was unfairly curtailed through electoral pandering to the sensitivities of the urban class. For me, a long-time country resident who has never been remotely part of the hunting community, it is an impressive display of beautifully honed animals and skilled equestrianism.

Rushing outside to catch what I can, I fall into conversation with a local resident and ex-hunter, as we watch the horses and dogs circulate round the field. Predictably perhaps, Jimmy bemoans the loss of hunting…

What people don’t see is the poor condition of foxes these days he says, the hunt used to cull the weaker foxes. Now they survive longer, they breed more, pass on diseases, and the result is an overall poorer gene-pool.

But surely I respond, just as many foxes are culled, just that now they are shot rather than hunted?

Sure, Jimmy replies, but shooting is indiscriminate. A lot of strong foxes are shot, or foxes with cubs, and foxes that would probably have escaped the hunt. The hunt used to catch the weaker foxes, the stronger ones usually escaped, and that kept the fox population in far better shape.

Jimmy tells me that diseases such as mange are far more prevalent now. In the past, Jimmy claims, unhealthy foxes were those most likely to be caught by the hunt, which was an effective way of culling out communicable diseases.

Hunting’s pretty cruel though I suggest to Jimmy. Not as cruel as shooting, he replies, a lot of foxes who are shot are only injured and die later. And when mothers with cubs are shot, their cubs die of starvation.

Well of course, he would say that. I decide to research the subject a little further.

The Labour government of Blair, having made electoral promises to address hunting, set up the Burns Inquiry to investigate the subject. After it reported, parliament was given a free vote and hunting was banned. An apparently fair and transparent process. Except not exactly. The Burns Inquiry offered little evidence to support a ban. Discussing their findings, Burns commented that ‘naturally, people ask whether we were implying that hunting is cruel... The short answer to that question is no.’

Burns found that objections to hunting fell into broadly two camps: those whose concern was cruelty to the fox, and those who thought hunting represented an age-old ritual of upper-class power and authority; animal welfare and class-conflict.

On the grounds of animal welfare, it is widely accepted that the fox has no natural predators and represents a threat to farmed animals such as lambs and poultry. As such, the population requires control in the form of selective culling. The question therefore, is how to cull foxes in the most effective way, with as little trauma to the fox as possible. Alternatives are shooting foxes in the open, or snaring and trapping, followed by shooting. Burns found that shot foxes were as often injured as killed; indeed, shooters aim for the body rather than the head, as the latter is too small a target at range, even with an accurate rifle. Shooting with a shotgun is worse, given the spread of shot, and as likely to wound as to kill foxes, which regularly escape, only to die later of their injuries. In fact, Burns appeared more supportive of a ban on shotguns than hunting, as a method of fox culling. Snaring and trapping were found to be particularly problematic. A snared or trapped fox is likely to chew off its own paw to escape, and such methods trap other, unintended, animals.

As for the pain and cruelty experienced by a fox killed by the hunt, Burns found, supported by a report from around 500 members of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, that it was likely on most occasions that death occurred instantaneously, of a severed spinal chord from a bite by the lead hound, considerably bigger and heavier than the fox. Even on occasions when this might not be the case, death occurred within two to three seconds. Burns accepted that the sight of a fox being torn apart by a pack of hounds might be unedifying to many people but, the inquiry concluded, this was likely to occur after death.

In conclusion, Burns found that although a clean head-shot was undoubtedly the ideal method of culling, it was far from likely that such a kill would occur in most cases. In the case of trapping and snaring, Burns was clear that such methods were likely to incur more pain and distress than hunting. Burns also found that shooting in upland areas was impractical, and that any distress alleviated by banning hunting in favour of shooting, was likely to be off-set by an increase in foxes suffering non-fatal gunshot wounds from which they died at a later date. As Burns concluded, the issues were far more ‘complex’ than they appeared.

It’s also worth pointing out that foxes which die of ‘natural causes’ are not nursed to their gentle demise by their caring cubs, nor are they ushered into a rest-home and proffered opiates to ease them to their foxy afterlife. They tend to die of starvation over days or weeks, unable to hunt or feed due to illness or weakness.

This leaves the argument that hunting represents an objectionable demonstration of upper-class authority. One of my decidedly anti-hunting friends, conceding he knew little about the issues, said I come at it from the class angle. Another told me, the elites have always used violence as a method of asserting their authority. Violence seems a loaded term. What one person calls violence, another calls pest-control. And what some call ‘elites’, people in the country call ‘farmers’. However, as Burns found overwhelmingly, the hunting community was far from ‘upper-class’, and was represented at every level of the rural community. Indeed, the proposed ban on hunting was contested by a large proportion of the whole countryside population, far out-weighing the so-called aristocrats and ‘elites’, whatever that term actually means. Surely this makes any ‘class’ argument irrelevant? This however, seems not to be easily accepted. Just because commoners take part, one friend said, doesn’t mean it is not an elite activity.

It seems that, for some, hunting is symbolic of the power of ‘elites’ over everyone else, even if it isn’t actually an exclusively elite activity, or seen that way by those many ordinary people who take part. Is this not simply the power of another hegemonic group? The authority of the ‘urban elite’ over the country bumpkins who need educating; who, poor things, don’t realise they are participating in an activity which reinforces their own oppression?

But there is a bigger issue here. In the mid-nineteenth century John Stuart Mill, in a key text on liberalism, discussed what he called the ‘tyranny of the majority’. Mill pointed out that the core question is, to what degree are governments entitled to restrict the activities of citizens? Mill observed that many laws are made to restrict activities which are simply unpopular or unfashionable with the majority. He further

pointed out that fashionable or popular opinions were often derived not from factual or objective research, but from the prejudices and whims of those who held them. He concluded that many laws are unfairly instituted which restrict the activities of others, simply because of the ‘tyranny of the majority’ over the unfashionable and unpopular minority.

The evidence from the inquiry set up to prefigure the ban on hunting concluded that hunting was not cruel and was very likely in many areas, the least cruel and most effective method of controlling the fox population. It is also notable that anti-hunt protestors seem less keen on objecting to the cruelty visited on battery-farmed chickens for example, and choose not to pay slightly higher prices for free range chicken and eggs. Equally, those who protest the authority of ‘elites’, seem less keen to pay a few pence more for their milk, by buying it direct from hard-pressed dairy producers, preferring to get it on the cheap from supermarkets who retain almost all the profits. Cows and chickens are less glamorous participants in the class war perhaps.

It seems far from clear why the lawful activities of a group or ‘class’ of people should be made unlawful, just because that group or ‘class’ is disliked on principle by another group or ‘class’. This is even more problematic when the perception that an activity like hunting is the exclusive preserve of one particular group or ‘class’, is factually and demonstrably incorrect. When such ideas interfere with the activities of the very group or ‘class’ of ‘ordinary people’ that protestors claim to represent from their urban ivory towers, they seem somewhat contradictory. It seems to me very reasonable to protest the tyranny of inequality, but to replace it with another tyranny, that of the fashionable majority, is no proper response. It may be an expedient of class war to support policies which pander to the tyranny of the majority, but is it morally and intellectually coherent?