Northern Trip 2023 Gallery
This year’s AGM took place on Friday 16th of June at the Duchy of Cornwall. We had a number of speeches at this year’s event, including the one below from Charlie Pye-Smith. His next book Rural Wrongs, the sequel to Rural Rites, is available for pre-order HERE. The AGM ended with a trip to the Wallace Collection to see their exhibition Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney.
“Although I have greatly enjoyed the time I’ve spent with hunting people over the past 30 years, I have never hunted and have no intention of doing so. When I have written about hunting I have tried to be an impartial, independent voice. This cuts no ice with animal rights organisations. Many years ago I asked for an interview with the director of the League Against Cruel Sports. The response: “We don’t talk to pro-blood sports journalists”. And if they respond to my latest book, which is about the impact of the 2004 Hunting Act in England and Wales and its equivalent in Scotland on wild animal welfare, it will be in a similar vein. The attack will be ad hominem: they will dismiss me, rather than the substance of the book.
I am delighted that the RS Surtees Society is publishing Rural Wrongs, for which Lord Moore has kindly written the foreword. As I say in the introduction, I am not so much pro-hunting, as anti-bad-law-making.
Six or seven years ago I was rung up by barrister in Kent. He explained that he was acting on behalf of a huntsman who was being prosecuted under the Hunting Act. He wanted to know if I had ever been sued for libel by Professor Stephen Harris, who the prosecution were calling as their expert witness.
Professor Harris was one of the key people called on by anti-hunting campaign groups to provide evidence at the public hearing on hunting held in Portcullis House in 2002. Harris’s evidence, supposedly based on sound science, convinced large numbers of MPs that hunting was cruel and should therefore be banned.
A couple of years after the 2004 Act was passed I wrote a book about it called Rural Rites: Hunting and Politics of Prejudice, in which I devoted a whole chapter to the abuse of science, particularly by Professor Harris.
I told the barrister that Harris hadn’t sued me. He said that in that case what I’d written must be true because it was so reputationally damaging to the scientist that he would have sued me if it wasn’t true.
A few weeks later he rang up to say the prosecution had failed and that his client, the huntsman, had been found not guilty. The barrister had asked Professor Harris whether he’d read my book. His reply was: “I wouldn’t dream of reading anything by Pye-Smith. He’s just a jobbing journalist in it for the money.”
Well, there are two things to say about that.
If I was in it for the money then I’d made a terrible career choice.
More importantly, this was one of the numerous occasions when prosecutions under the Hunting Act failed. One of the reasons they fail is because the Hunting Act was so badly drafted and full of contradictions. Even if a huntsman has been hunting, rather than following a pre-laid trail (as he should be under the existing law), it is often difficult to prove.
Since I wrote Rural Rites I have kept in touch with Jim Barrington, who was closely involved in the research for the book. As I’m sure many of you know, Jim was the Director of the League Against Cruel Sports before he had what is nowadays known as an epiphany, and decided that banning hunting would actually make matters worse for the fox, not better. He is now animal welfare advisor to the Countryside Alliance.
A couple of years ago, over a curry at the India Club, Jim said it was an absolute disgrace that the antis, who’d spent some £30 million campaigning for the hunting ban, had failed to look at the impact of the Hunting Act on animal welfare. My view was that they had no incentive to do so. After all, they’d pretty much won this battle. The people who should have investigated the impact of the Act were the hunting organisations.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t. So Jim and I decided that we would. Hence the Rural Wrongs project.
Over the past two years, Jim and I spent some 50 days in the field talking to huntsmen, gamekeepers, farmers, conservationists and scientists – the people at the sharp end of countryside management – about the impact of the hunting ban. The only people we didn’t talk to were the organisations who campaigned for a ban. Predictably, they refused to see us.
So briefly, what did we find? We found that the Hunting Act and its equivalent in Scotland have been a disaster for animal welfare. They have made life worse for the fox, red deer and brown hare, not better.
The subtitle of Rural Wrongs is Hunting and the Unintended Consequences of Bad Law. This has been wonderfully illustrated when it comes to the fate of the brown hare.
I imagine most of you are foxhunters, like Jorrocks, rather than hare coursers. So perhaps you are unaware of the huge amount of work coursing clubs used to devote to helping farmers conserve the brown hare and create the habitat for them to thrive. They’d pay farmers compensation for loss of pasture; they would encourage farmers to plant cover crops; they’d go on anti-poaching patrols at the weekends.
In the last year of legal coursing, the clubs operating under National Coursing Club rules killed 168 hares. In just two days after the ban came into force, 3000 hares were shot on two estates in East Anglia – not to satisfy an increase in demand for jugged hare, but deter gangs of poachers from invading the land.
Many of the people we spoke to in East Anglia believed that the Hunting Act led directly to a significant increase in illegal hare coursing, which involves huge amounts of money being bet on dogs which can fetch over £20,000 on the dark web. Illegal coursers are often involved in other criminal matters and there have been numerous instances of them attacking landowners and gamekeepers and destroying property.
Red deer in the West Country have also suffered from the unintended consequences of bad law. Under exemptions in the Act, the three packs of staghounds continue to hunt, but they can only use two dogs rather than a full pack.
One of the main functions of the hunts has always been to track down and dispatch casualty deer – such as deer which have wounded by poachers or hit by cars. Finding injured deer is far harder with two hounds than it was with a full pack. The Devon and Somerset Staghounds estimate that they now dispatch a quarter to a third of the number of casualty deer they used to get. This means that significantly more deer are being left to die a miserable and painful death. And that’s all because of the Hunting Act. In other words, MPs voted for a measure which made like worse for the quarry species.
As a result of the restriction on the number of hounds the hunts can use, red deer are now gathering in greater concentrations than in the past. This has almost certainly led to a rise in bovine TB. Recent research has found that the incidence of bovine TB in red deer on the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate – the Trust banned stag hunting on its land in the 1990s – is some three times greater than in areas where the hunts still operate.
So red deer, like the brown hare, are now worse off because of the Hunting Act.
The same is true for the fox, although the picture is more complicated.
In some areas, foxes have been absolutely hammered. Several huntsmen we met reckoned their fox populations are now half what they used to be or less. In other areas, they still seem to be doing quite well – and indeed the fact that some gamekeepers are shooting 300 or so foxes a year, year after year, suggests that they are by no means heading for extinction.
The story varies from place to place.
Take the uplands. Before the Hunting Act, many sheep farmers relied on the local huntsman to catch foxes that were killing lambs. Since the Act, most are calling on the services of marksmen as the law prevents huntsmen from using hounds to track down lamb-killing foxes.
A huntsman in the West Country told us the following story about a farmer in Devon who didn’t like using the hunt. He knew most of his ewes were going to produce twins as they had been scanned in the winter. Yet every day when he arrived in his fields he would find ewes with a single lamb, born the previous night. That meant one of each pair was being killed by a fox.
He hired a local marksman, who shot 17 foxes in a few nights. But he was still losing lambs, so he eventually called the huntsman in desperation. The huntsman and four or five couple of hounds swiftly tracked down a mangy dog fox, a vixen and 5 cubs in an earth below a fence post. The huntsman dispatched them and that was the end of the problem.
As the huntsman pointed out, this meant that 17 healthy foxes which weren’t killing lambs had been killed for no reason. Much better to use the hunts than a marksman, from both the farmer’s point of view and the foxes’.
What’s happened to the fox since 2004 is not just about the Hunting Act.
Since the ban came into force, the availability of high-tech thermal imaging and night-vision equipment has made it much easier to shoot foxes. And “foxing” has become a field sport in its own right, enjoyed not just by people who have a legitimate reason for controlling foxes but by people who see fox-shooting as a form of entertainment.
The dramatic increase in the intensity of game shooting has also been bad news for the fox. For example, a generation ago, there were just four or five shoots on Exmoor; now there is at least one big shoot in every valley. A generation ago, they would shoot just one day a week during the season; now many shoot five or six days a week and 1000-bird days are common. In the Beaufort country, there were around 10 shoots in 1985. There are now more than 65.
This is a high-stakes industry. One of my friends – my only friend who shoots – told me that he recently paid £16,000 for day’s shooting on Exmoor. Each of the 8 guns gave the head keeper a tip of £100. Little wonder then that gamekeepers have become ruthless in pursuit of predators which threaten their birds.
The sad fact is that in places where shooting is such a profitable industry, the hunts have lost whatever influence they used to have. In the past many landowners encouraged their gamekeepers to leave some foxes for the hunt. That old social contract has waned since the ban, and foxes are now being shot in much greater numbers.
To sum up: the Hunting Act and its Scottish equivalent have been a disaster for animal welfare, and the sooner they are replaced with something else the better. If that’s to happen, then the organisations representing hunting need to make a case for reform. If nothing else, I hope that Rural Wrongs will provide them with the raw material to do that.”
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