The government’s campaign to ban the rural practice of hunting foxes with hounds – motivated by a mix of sentimentality about animals, some genuine concern about cruelty and a lot of spite – has proven to be a waste of time, at least as far as I can judge from some news reports as well as direct personal experience. On the latter point, a foxhunt came across some open land that is owned by my father – what was left after he sold the bulk of the farm in Suffolk. The hunt did not ask my dad about coming across the land, and in fact caused a fair amount of damage to several hedges. My old man was, understandably, not very amused.
It is sometimes assumed that farmers and other folk who work the land must be in favour of hunting vermin and therefore support foxhunting. I ‘support’ it in the sense that I tolerate it. I tend to regard foxhunting as a mildly silly activity but there are lots of silly activities which make up the eccentric land of ours. Just because one might not enjoy a certain pursuit in no way justifies banning it. On practical grounds, if one wants to control wild animals like foxes, a rifle is arguably better use than a bunch of dogs. Riding to hounds across open fields and over high hedges might at one stage have been good training for a budding cavalry soldier. And Let’s face it, foxhunters chase foxes because they enjoy it; they enjoy steaming across the countryside, with all the adrenalin rushes and cameraderie that this brings. And a man and woman look pretty damn good in those riding clothes.
Even so, many farmers, such as tenant farmers, resent the hunt. When tenant farmers were more common than they are now, a landlord could ride across the tenant’s farm at will, and force said tenant to maintain the land in such a way as to keep up the supply of foxes, pheasants, partridges and other targets. Roger Scruton, in his ‘elegy’ to old England, defends the pattern of landholding in such terms (he denies the idea that one owns property in any absolute sense, but more as a sort of lease from the State). With the rise of owner-occupier farmers, however, it is not quite so simple for hunters to gallop across the land in pursuit of game come what may. The clash between foxhunters and farmers is rather ironic, given that some commenters tend to lump all country dwellers in the same mental category.
Respect for property rights is in decline in this nation, and from all quarters. The assault on property rights, such as telling owners of pubs that their clients cannot smoke even if no-one is forcing anyone to frequent a place, is only one such example. The ability of people to change their property is constrained as never before by planning laws. Landowners are also affected. All the more reason, then, why devotees of the hunt should respect the rights of people who are, in usual circumstances, tolerant of the men who chase the fox to the cries of Tally Ho!
I think the fox-hunting bill demonstrates NuLab’s incompetence in passing legislation.
1. It was a widely touted part of the manifesto and supported by a pretty large majority of the public.
2. Labour had a huge majority with seats in largely urban areas.
And yet, they managed to waste huge amounts of parliamentary time over this only to in the end get a ridiculous, unenforceable compromise law passed.
This was a piece of gesture politics which became a five-act opera with a denoument which pleased nobody.
Well, that’s NuLab for you.
Hunts illegally chasing foxes would always (do?, will?) enter other people’s land because that is where the foxes go. If foxes kept to footpaths, so would packs of hounds and hunt supporters. ‘Hunt havoc’ was a commonpiece of traditional hunting.
If the law is broken on a farmer’s land, they have two options: to tolerate it or not.
Can’t have people running around being tolerant and celebrating their [Anglo-Saxon] cultural heritage now can we?
Get thee home to the television set for another dose of X-factor followed by a quick dose of multicultural celebration you lumpen-prole nu-lab retard.
People voted for this?
So if a fox comes through your garden and into your house you won’t mind then if a bunch of dogs chases after it and royally trashes your property. After all, it is all part of the ancient customs of olde England, right? Where do you live? I am sure we can put your tolerance to the test.
No, owners of property do not have to “tolerate” violations of what is theirs. Foxhunts frequently damage crops, hedges and other pieces of land (I know a lot of farmers who suffered thousands of pounds of damage and battled hard to get compensation for this.). Damage to land in this way is a tort under English Common Law, by the way.
Let’s be clear about this in case you missed it in my comment: just because many of the folk who hate foxhunting are nihilistic twits with sentimental views about animals does not mean that this gives carte blanche to hunters or anyone else to violate the rights of other people’s property.
I find it a bit vexing to have to point that out on a site like this.
Can’t have people running around being tolerant and celebrating their [Anglo-Saxon] cultural heritage now can we?
Get thee home to the television set for another dose of X-factor followed by a quick dose of multicultural celebration you lumpen-prole nu-lab retard.
People voted for this?
Wolfie, glad you got that off your chest. Brew yourself a nice coffee or lie down for half an hour. The fever will pass. The reference to “multicultural celebration”, what has that got to do with this posting?
Round my Sister’s way (Oxfordshire) the local hunt regularly reconfirms their leave to ride across land. They regularly check with my Sister, who says no. They don’t enter her land. My Sister is not anti hunting, btw.
This is how it should be IMHO. If landowners were against hunting then hunting should die out PDQ.
My impression, from the small number of country people I have discussed foxes with, is that they intensely dislike them. Foxes took a high toll of chickens, ducks and lambs, which were common in the mixed farms of the past. Damage to a hedge was easily fixed. The loss of all your hens was a disaster. So the hunt was their friend.
A rifle or a shotgun is a cruel way to kill foxes, as even in the hands of a skilled marksman, many foxes would be wounded and escape, probably to die days or weeks later. Hounds are humane, as they will either kill the fox or it will escape uninjured.
Yesterday evening arriving home by car at our North London suburban home a big dog fox stood on our drive and looked me in the eye, before peeing on our tree and casually strolling off up the road. What a splendid anarchist.
Johnathan,
I understand what you mean. In the days when everyone kept chickens, foxes were an evil that people were prepared to put up with a bit of damage to be rid of. It was a sort of voluntary cooperative understanding, part of the social metacontext. But now that there are people who own property in the country without livestock, they’re no longer so interested in participating for the common good.
It’s a bit like when the police are in ‘hot pursuit’ of the burglar or mugger over the fences of people’s gardens. They should not, of course, chase a thief over private property without getting a court warrant. Otherwise its trespass, and any damage they do in the process is criminal. And if that means thieves getting away with their crimes, that’s the price we must pay for respecting property law.
I agree with you. Voluntary association has to imply that people don’t have to join in, even if that means the rest of the community suffers. But maybe all you have to do is to call the hunt up and ask them not to do it again? Maybe they just made an error of ignorance? It’s worth a try.
PA, we have spoken to the hunt before and they know that there is a problem, especially on fields with freshly-sown crops and so on. Most of the folk are perfectly decent about it but it has happened several times.
Part of the problem is that Suffolk is heavily dominated by wheat, barley and other crops, rather than full of meadows with livestock. Foxhunting is much less of a problem in the latter type of landscape since the damage to the land tends to be less.
I once saw a fox running down Gray’s Inn Road, central London, on my way in to work very early a few years ago. The creature was as bold as brass. Lovely colour.
There are a number of issues here. The Hunting Act seeks to ban certain forms of hunting which a majority of the population, to varying degrees, does not like. Many of those who dislike hunting may do so because of perceived welfare concerns, however the Act has nothing to do with the welfare of the hunted animal, nor indeed cruelty, neither of which are even referred to in it.
Accordingly, if your concerns are based on welfare, the Act is an irrelevance.
On the separate issue of the landowner who does not want the hunt crossing his land, the position is straightforward. He can get an injunction to stop them trespassing, there was no need for the Hunting Act to deal with this at all, as indeed the League Against Sports showed when it obtain an injunction to stop a hunt entering its own land.
In any event as the police do not appear to be taking the Act particularly seriously, or at least only as seriously as other offences with no custodial sentence, and as the Tories have said they will allow time to repeal it when the are next in Government, it is unlikely to have any long term significance.
Nothing wrong with hunting with dogs. Tresspass is tresspass. I don’t see why we’d need to get rid of the former to avoid the latter, so I totally oppose the ban.
Although, it does leave me a lot more foxes to shoot 😀
To me, it’s intuitive: hunting is good and a pretty cool way to waste my days off. And if I don’t have permission to enter someone’s property, I don’t enter. I don’t see why its so complex.
Here in my state, the legal assumption is that private land is closed to hunting unless the owner has specifically consented. The burden is on the hunter to obtain consent from the landowner, and to be aware of where he actually is.
I guess I don’t see why we even need to discuss this.
Does Roger S. really believe that one owns land only as a sort of lease from the State – or is he making the compact between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born point (which he would take from Hegel. and I would take from Burke).
One can use the word “state” to mean something else than “government”.
Of course formally we do not “own” land under common law we “hold” it – a hang over from Norman feudalism.
However, European feudalism is not the same as the despotic tradition one finds, for example, in Islamic tradition where the ruler really does own all the land – and can take it on a whim.
As far back as the Edict of Quierzy in 877 (which came from the same period and town as the attack on predestination I believe) it was held in France that land could not be taken away by the King apart from as due punishment (imposed by the legal process) for a crime – and not looking after it was not a crime.
Charles the Great (dead in 814) may have been a despot (as bad as any Islamic despot), but France can not (formally speaking) be held to be a despotism after 877.
In England (even after the conquest) Henry I upheld this same principle (that land could not just be taken by the King) in his charter of 1100, and it was repeated in the Great Charter forced on King John in 1215.
As late as the 18th century the Crown (not the same thing as the person of the King of course) was still trying to chip away at land rights – and not just in the American colonies. Even the Duke of Portland found himself being asked to “prove his title” to various properties, or have them “revert to the Crown”. Edmund Burke led the charge in Parliament to have such actions by the Crown declared unlawful – the person in possession of land was declared (by statute) to not have to “prove” anything (hence no need for a land register).
Of course in the 19th century there was some forced sales of land to railway companies (by Acts of Parliament – although this was blocked in the case of Stamford), and in the 20th century all Hell broke lose – but I do not wish to write about this.
So this “look after the land or lose your right to it” is a moral thing not a legal thing – although it being a moral thing does not make it unimportant (moral tradition is very important indeed).
Almost neeless to say, those who look to the government to preseve the “character of rural England” are making an absurd error. It is hard to believe that Roger S. would be so foolish.
A friend of mine and his wife are both fox hunters. Here in Vermont it can get a bit sketchy because of the rocky, slippery and uneven ground, so real fox hunts are a rarity. But they will go down around Shelburne or Charlotte way where the club will drag a fox scent across the best and safest (and least irksome to other land owners) path through forest and dale.
Real fox hunts are still quite common in Virginia and folks will go down about this time of year and in the fall where the hounds chase the fox and actually kill it if it doesn’t escape. In Virginia, the large amount of open land is more like that in Merrie Olde Englande and much more conducive to madly galloping about in hot pursuit of baying hounds.
Personally, it all sounds like great fun. The ladies do look smashing in the riding clothes, especially if they attain the rank where they can wear the red Winchester coat.
As you know Uain, Vermont is a State of strong contrasts.
Very traditional in some ways (as you point out) and anti “gun control”.
But with a strong socialist movement and the highest State and local taxes (as a percentage of total output) in the nation (Vermont 14.1% if I remember the Tax Foundation stats correctly, just ahead of Maine and New York).
Some blame this on the influx into Vermont of rich “liberals” from places like New York. Some with family names showing a similar origin to my own family name. Although, in defence of people with names like mine, Milton Friedman loved Vermont (although the house was over the border in New Hampshire) – so we are not all socialists.
I have never been to Vermont (indeed I have rarely been far from where I now am, although I did visit Paris as a child, – and, sadly, I am unlikely to ever travel), but it does not suprise me that Vermont is rocky.
Last ice expansion scrape the place?
This is the story in New Hampshire – the “Granite State” indeed, but a place where people always “farmed stones”
Farm land is much better where I live (Northamptonshire) and there is a hunt very close to me. But the hunt is unlawful and the good land of my county (and other counties near by) is being built on by a mixture of government schemes and credit-money bubble private schemes. And farming has all been distorted by subsidies and regulations anyway (the regulations hurt more than the subsidies, which often do not turn up anyway, help – but most people do not understand that).
As for Virginia – yes “The Old Dominion” (or the “Cavalier State”) indeed.
Even in Britain, Virginia is known for fox hunting. Alhough, I hear, there is a lot of development in the northern part of the State.
The standard mixture of government schemes (road building and such) and credit-money bubble private schemes.
The influx of people this brings (and the sort of people it brings) is the real reason that James Webb (for all his traditional roots) was elected, and is why the Democrats now control the United States Senate.