Scent of battle

YOU will not, I fear, be too pleased with me. I have just spent a day hunting. And not with any old hunt, but perhaps the best, the classiest, hunt in England, the Duke of Beaufort ‘s in Gloucestershire. My horse was borrowed from Lord Mancroft, and he and Prince Charles, who hunts regularly with the Beaufort, led the way. Impressed? No, I thought not. A disagreeable pastime practised by toffs. Oscar Wilde’s putdown is on the tip of your tongue. But I’m not here to convert you, merely to describe, so bear with me before sending an abusive postcard.

I had never hunted before; I’m not even much of a rider, so this was stupidity on a grand scale. Hunting is dangerous – and not just for foxes. The obituary columns of Horse and Hound regularly record the deaths of riders out hunting. It would be almost impossible to hunt regularly without sustaining serious injury – broken backs, twisted pelvises and cracked heads are par for a pretty challenging course.

So, yes, I was crazy. I was also rather disadvantaged socially. All the 180 or so gathered for this Saturday meet knew each other, rode together regularly, and had the right kit – top hat, cravat, blue hunting jacket. I felt ridiculous in crash hat and short-sleeved Barbour I was going to fall and fall without the necessary style. As one of my new friends remarked – Roger Scruton actually – I was dressed as you would expect a representative of the Guardian to be dressed for hunting. I think it may have been a polite insult.

We met at a grand house in a village near Malmesbury. Lots of tall, distinguished men with faces suggesting Jacobean outrage. Landowners, farmers, City types, solicitors. We drank some whisky; sausage rolls were brandished; introductions made; camaraderie flowed. Hunting is indeed in large part social.

It was a cold, bright, frosty morning – a few degrees more frost and the ground would have been too hard for the horses to go out. As it was, it was perfect as the sun broke through for an 11am start (there must be a technical term for the way it begins, but no glossary was provided). I was on a horse called Rafferty – a delight, bombproof as they say in the trade, which meant that I would have to be truly hopeless to fall off. (I am truly hopeless, but I wasn’t about to tell Rafferty that.) I also had a minder, a huntsman of many years’ standing who had been a Master of two hunts.

I had assumed that hunting was really just an excuse for a good, fast ride, a sort of mass hack across delightful countryside. For some it is that – a chance to ride and jump in sometimes testing circumstances. The randomness attracts too. On an ordinary ride you go where you fancy; on a hunt you follow the fox wherever it takes you. You meet obstacles you would never contemplate jumping normally; you take chances; you come a cropper.

Riding is thus part of it, but for many the lesser part. Why else would there be more people following the hunt on foot or by car than on horseback? There is some odd social force at work here. The foot followers hold gates open for the riders, help to spot the fox, join in the slightly batty enterprise of catching it. I suspect that no one really minds if it escapes: the pursuit is everything; the atavistic urge of a diverse group of country folk to work together for a common end.

The other great attraction for the true hunt follower is to watch the hounds at work. For a novice like me, somebody literally along for the ride, this is hard to grasp. But my hugely experienced companion and the groom of the horse I had borrowed gave me an insight into the beauty – there is simply no other word to describe what they were seeing – of a pack of hounds following a scent, working in unison to track a fox. For these cognoscenti, the riding had become irrelevant: they would have been happy simply to spend the day watching the hounds.

The gulf between the 250,000 people who hunt regularly and the large swathe of the British public who oppose it in polls and the smaller swathe who oppose it in person is unbridgeable. For the hunters it is the most humane way of keeping the number of foxes in check; for the anti-hunters it is a demonstration of upper-class blood-lust.

Roger Scruton is perhaps the most vocal and articulate advocate of hunting. Writing in the Times last week, he said: “I know . . . that hunting with hounds is the kindest way of controlling foxes, and the best way to achieve a modus vivendi with the endearing pest. I therefore regard with alarm the prospect of a parliament whose members are as ignorant of this issue as they are of virtually everything else pronouncing my sport to be a crime.”

If Labour is elected with a decent majority next year, that is precisely what may happen. Labour has promised a free vote on the issue, and the majority of Labour members would vote to ban hunting. But when that vote will take place is anyone’s guess: the party leadership is under pressure from its candidates in rural constituencies to calm the impending storm by promising an inquiry into all sports involving wild animals.

Such an inquiry could take as long as two years and would be likely to alter the terms of the debate: if the inquiry found in favour of hunting, for example, could a Labour government then reasonably legislate against it? Like all inquiries, it would buy time (and save the odd vote) but store up problems and contradictions for the future.

Hunting is at a watershed and the political and PR battle is likely to be intense. Opponents of hunting argue that it is an indefensible remnant of medieval brutality: how can pursuing a terrified fox to the point of exhaustion possibly be called a sport? The British Field Sports Society, which puts the case for hunting, counters that to ban it would still leave the problem of controlling foxes, which kill lambs, chickens and other farm animals. Gassing, snaring and shooting are, they argue, less humane and less selective. Moreover, about 30,000 jobs would be lost and a key unifier of rural life would disappear.

They call in support James Barrington, former chief executive of the League Against Cruel Sports, who resigned last year because he had come to accept the case for hunting. Barrington has set up a new organisation, Wildlife Network, which supports hunting but seeks to control terrier work, whereby foxes that go to ground are dug out and shot. His initiative faces one major problem: if foxes were not dug out and killed, farmers wouldn’t see the point of hunting, or allow hunters to cross their land. He is therefore unlikely to be successful in finding a middle way between two intractably opposed groups.

So what about me? Where do I stand on the basis of one day’s hunting? On the fence, of course. I don’t for a moment believe that huntsfolk are motivated by blood-lust. Most do not care if a fox is caught or not, though the Master and his whippers-in consider a poor day’s hunting an affront to their pride. But the hunt has to believe in the pest control and conservation aspects of its work to sustain its purpose, so in a way the body count does matter.

Hunting contributes to social cohesion, the rural economy and the quality of bloodstock, but none of this will wash with its opponents, for whom the fear experienced by the fox, the possibility of a painful death and the primitivism of the chase outweigh all practical considerations. Ultimately the question is one of man’s right to make sport of an animal’s life – something that is taken for granted in the country but may soon face its greatest political challenge. The hunters are about to become the hunted.

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