End of the trail looms for hunters
WHATEVER the repercussions that might ensue in terms of landowners kicking trail hunters off their acres once and for all, the case of Mark Hankinson has revealed quite clearly that the hunting classes (as many of us have known for a very long time) are not to be trusted.
Hankinson, who holds the hallowed post of director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, has been caught bang to rights advising his followers how to lay a smokescreen of false trails in order to (as it were) throw saboteurs off the scent while they get on with the serious and illegal business of letting dogs tear live foxes to shreds.
And if anyone tries to tell me that’s not what happens at the end of a hunt then let me assure them that it is. I have witnessed it, it sickened me, and even after the passing of a lot of years I am unable to forget what I saw.
Hankinson’s online advice session has now cost him the ineradicable stigma of a criminal conviction and a £3,500 penalty.
But no one should really be the least bit surprised that ostensibly legal trail hunting is being used as a cover for the hunters’ vile activities: it is merely one example of the nodand-wink culture that continues to permeate the world of hunting where there is only grudging, token respect for the law and where the adherents still regard themselves either as being completely above it or as having some kind of duty to circumvent it.
Stag hunting as it was formerly conducted may have become illegal but on Exmoor stags are still being hunted and killed, each death celebrated by the followers as another finger up to the establishment.
Since it’s pretty well impossible for police to monitor every hunt to make sure the letter of the law is complied with (even if there were any enthusiasm for doing so, which there isn’t) it’s left to the sabs and anti-blood sports campaigners to gather what evidence they can.
That can be quite a perilous occupation because I don’t believe stag hunters’ attitudes towards antis have changed much since the days when John Hicks was the League’s warden on Exmoor and he would often arrive at my house bearing the cuts and bruises resulting from being roughed up by hunt followers.
Hankinson’s assertion in court that he was merely advising how hunts should react if saboteurs disrupted legal hunts was dismissed as a lie by the beak. But the more their activities have been scrutinised over the years the more the hunters have resorted to lying in an attempt to convince a largely uninformed public that all they were doing was indulging in a harmless yet traditional countryside activity which was enjoyed by all: the elite riding classes, the peasantry who followed on foot, the dogs, and even (unbelievably) the quarry.
For, bizarrely, when stag hunting first came under the spotlight there were people who were prepared to stand up in public and claim the deer actually enjoyed being chased. Such a shame, then, that their enjoyment had to be terminated with a bullet – if they were lucky (see below).
Lie continues to be piled upon lie in the finest tradition of Goebbels – famous for remarking: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Whenever the media chose to challenge the whole, medieval barbarity of stag hunting the porkies would start pouring from the mouths either of hunt officials or later, when the pressure began building up, equally reptilian British Field Sports Society spokesmen.
The ‘stags enjoy hunting’ line was dropped in favour of slightly more credible justification for the thriceweekly exhibitions of naked, whiskyfuelled bloodlust accompanied by lunatic driving, roads illegally obstructed by followers’ cars and all the rest of the ancillary activities which would have had any individual not enjoying the anonymity and protection of the hunting rabble hauled into court and fined.
The hunts, we were assured by red-coated and puce-faced hunt officials, only went after the older and possibly ailing stags in order to ensure the health and well-being of the herd. A lie. Hunts invariably singled out the fittest deer which would provide the longest chase and therefore the most ‘sport’ – a fact they themselves would reveal, stupidly shooting themselves in the foot when the local paper carried their own reports on their days in the field containing references to ‘a good point’ of some seven or eight miles or more.
Deer, we were solemnly assured, were not put through any excessive suffering. As soon as they had had enough of the chase they would stop, the hounds would be called off and a marksman would be brought up to execute a clean kill.
A lie. There were repeated reports of deer being mauled by hounds, such a scene eventually being captured by video camera – the vital weapon which eventually shot stag hunting down in flames – to disprove the assertion, itself undermined by the incident when hunt supporters threw themselves on an exhausted deer as it emerged from a hedge onto a road in the Exe Valley and proceeded to slaughter it with pocket knives.
Stag hunting, we were told amid much thumping of table tops, was the only possible way to control deer numbers because shooting was not an option on Exmoor. There were far too many tourists around and the chances of one of them being unwittingly and tragically picked off by a stray bullet were far too high for any such risk to be taken.
Another lie. The end of most hunting seasons (particularly those where the kills had been fairly low) would be marked by a deer drive – an entirely illegal operation where numbers of the animals would be chased by dogs down into a valley to meet death in front of a line of guntoting hunt members.
This argument also overlooked the fact that despite the apparently unacceptable risk of collateral damage being inflicted on the tourism industry poachers were picking off deer to their hearts’ content.
All of this was surrounded by the general bluster about outsiders (a) having no right to go poking their noses into what went on the countryside and (b) not understanding the first thing about hunting anyway, so what right had they to criticise it?
Unfortunately for the entrenched hunters the outsiders did understand one thing: that animals were being cruelly and unnecessarily killed. And the outsiders were becoming an increasingly powerful voice. Thanks to the growth in second – and holiday – home ownership Exmoor was undergoing a demographic shift. The days of feudalism and general grovelling deference to the hunt were over. It was now increasingly peopled by those who had grown up and lived elsewhere and were thus not bound by the sinister, archaic codes that surrounded hunting.
They were neither frightened to speak out against it nor likely to be intimidated by the tactic often used against its critics – a visit from a hunt or BFSS official delivering a virtual black spot by suggesting darkly that since they were living in hunting country it would be best if they accepted the hunts’ way of doing things and kept their views to themselves – or they might find life in the community becoming ‘difficult’.
Gradually the walls of the protective bubble inside which hunting of the most bloodthirsty kind was surviving began to give way. They finally disintegrated with the publication of the Bateson report revealing the extreme stress and suffering inflicted on hunted deer. A comprehensively damning indictment which effectively meant the game was up for the stag hunts.
As it is now for Hankinson. And as, with luck, it will be for the farcical activity of trail hunting and the cynical, illegal killing of foxes that takes place behind its elaborately crafted smokescreens.