Trust’s vote on trail hunting may have wider ramifications

A VOTE by National Trust members to ban trail hunting on its land is a significant one, given the scale of the organisation.

The charity owns some 250,000 hectares of land, along with more than 200 historic properties and hundreds of miles of coastline.

But over and above the acreage over which the National Trust has jurisdiction is the esteem in which this heritage conservation charity is held by the general public, much loved across the nation and commanding a huge membership of some 5.6 million.

On Saturday, it announced the results of a vote on whether to allow trail hunting on Trust land – the majority of votes cast being in favour of the motion to ban the activity.

The National Trust and Forestry England had already suspended licences for trail hunting on their land last November, in response to a police investigation into leaked footage of hunt webinars some months earlier.

Mark Hankinson, director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, was last month found guilty at Westminster Magistrates’ Court of intentionally encouraging huntsmen to use legal trail hunting as cover for the unlawful chasing and killing of animals via two webinars held in

August, 2020. He was ordered to pay £3,500, with the judge concluding that he was “clearly encouraging the mirage of trail laying to act as cover for old-fashioned illegal hunting”.

The National Trust members’ vote on the issue following the case will be welcomed or disputed, depending on which side of the fence one sits in this divisive issue.

The Countryside Alliance argues that the number of members who took part in the vote is only a “tiny proportion” of National Trust supporters, with total votes cast amounting to about 2% of membership. Polly Portwin, the Countryside Alliance’s director of the campaign for hunting, said that this meant there was “absolutely no mandate for prohibition of a legal activity which has been carried out on National Trust land for generations”.

Meanwhile, Andy Knott, chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, said: “Enough is enough. Now the membership has voted to permanently end it, we must insist the National Trust’s trustees listen and act.”

The vote is not binding and it will now be up to the Trust’s board of trustees to make a formal decision – though it would certainly be surprising if trustees ignored the result, given the potential backlash.

Whatever the board decides, the vote has widened debate on the issue beyond the long-running and often acrimonious on-the-ground disputes between hunt saboteurs and hunt followers, to encompass a broader audience in seeking the opinions of National Trust members in general.

And if the National Trust board formalises the vote decision, then other landowners may consider following suit. From the Duchy to the Ministry of Defence to those national park authorities which licence trail hunts, there will be no let-up in campaigning on both sides of this issue over the months to come.