The Cruel Season

Saturday the 29^th of October is the start of the new Fox Hunting season and perhaps we should perhaps pause and reflect as to what foxing hunting is today in the modern countryside. This is where vehicles, riders and hunters are all wired with salient navigation and robust mobile communication providing detailed terrain mapping and route management.

Guardians of countryside traditions you will often here the hunters call. But with all these modern trappings the terrier men, sometime called countrymen, will be out driving there Kawasaki Quad bikes adored with boxes of terriers, spades, metal rods and root cutters ready to unearth any fox who dares not to play ball with the hounds and seeks refuge underground. All these facilities together with dozens of dogs and human followers to persecute a defenseless wild animal in a one-sided ritual to titillate sadistic humans out for a days so called hunting. 

The Countryside Alliance will again be promoting hunting and all its positive attributes to the general public, media, politicians and rural communities. The spin will go along the lines of “Fox hunters are the true representatives of rural England, binding the countryside together as farmers and landowners unite in a common cause.” But in reality they are as representative of rural England as Eton and Harrow Colleges are of our education system.

Publicly the hunts will be saying that they meet 'with organizers laying a scent for the hounds to track. Monitors nationwide, however, testify that for most Hunts this is merely a charade, designed to thinly disguise the fact that they are carrying on hunting as if the ban didn't exist, with the same callous disregard for the welfare and feelings of their animal victims and with many individuals appearing to arrogantly consider themselves above the law. Time and time again reports emerge of the chaos caused as hounds riot and trespass, attack livestock and peoples pets, stamping over gardens and damaging property.

Journalists are apparently consensually beguiled by the Countryside Alliance, while the few Monitors beat desperately on the door of the media, which is rarely opened. 

The current Police Minster Nicholas Le Quesne Herbert (Nick Herbert) was a former Public Affairs Officer of the British Field Sport Society (BFSS) which is now the Countryside Alliance. This may explain why police forces up and down the country do little or nothing enforcing the Hunting Act. The same parallels exist between the Metropolitan police and the early days of the phone hacking scandal by News International; phone hacking, what phone hacking!

The ban on hunting; including stag, hare, fox and mink, or is it otter now, is overwhelmly supported by the general public, but the hunting traditions of the heredity privileged and landowning elite who have always acted outside the realms of any government seem to have played heavily on the police for any enforcement of the ban as the hunters riot around the countryside; the untouchables in full purist of the inedible.