New Statesman Scotland

It can be a dangerous business: the animal is usually led to a quiet corner of an outlying field well away from farm buildings and roads. But the crack of the pistol report turns heads more than a mile away. Shot at point-blank range, it goes down like a felled tree. Careful vets drive a metal spike through the bullet-hole into the brain tissue.

At the end of next summer, when cheap pasture gives way to expensive hay and hard feed and there is no fox-hunting to be done, thousands of fit, good-looking and much-loved horses will be taken out of their stables and shot. Despite the mess, vets prefer to use a revolver because it means that they can dispose of the carcass to the knacker, who often sells it on to hunt kennels. But since thousands of foxhounds will also be destroyed (the idea that these animals will make household pets is laughable), that part of their market will vanish overnight. Lethal injections are less dangerous and perhaps kinder to the horse, particularly one that is frightened and difficult to control, but in those cases the carcass has to be buried or incinerated.

Tens of thousands of animals will die as a direct result of anti-hunting legislation, and none of them will be foxes. The antis have little to say about this, for obvious reasons, while for the pros it is a prospect few of them can bear to entertain - and those who have the wit to consider matters of presentation can see that to raise it will only make them seem even more hard-hearted and cruel. In any case the Countryside Alliance and the other pressure groups are rarely represented by the many people on low incomes who pour all their spare cash and care into the expensive business of keeping a hunter well fed and fit.

These are the people who will be forced to have their horses shot if there is nothing for them to do. Because the bottom will drop out of the horse-dealing market - it is, in fact, in steep decline even now - they cannot sell them or even give them away. Many tears will be shed for the forced deaths of much-loved animals. And passions will therefore run very high, driven by a tide of anger against those who imposed a law to protect animals no one ever knew or loved.

Indeed there are many, both in town and in the country, who regard foxes as destructive vermin. The bills to ban fox-hunting will take on an emblematic significance that will sharpen the already widening divisions between urban and rural.

These are old divides, with familiar prejudices arranged on either side, but while bumpkins and slickers have exchanged cliches and jokes over a very long period, the balance of raw political power has never seemed so stark as it is now.

After the recent, highly charged campaigns on the issues of animal transport, genetically modified foods and other agricultural matters, farmers and country workers feel consistently driven into the wrong, into the role of bad guys.

Characterised as cruel and uncaring, many feel that their jobs - even vocations in some cases - as providers of food to the nation are not valued at all.

Farming can be hard and lonely work with limited rewards. And no matter how powerful their traditions as providers, no one likes to feel so violently unwanted or, worse, misunderstood. An exodus of people off the land is already beginning, and while numbers are too small for that to develop into anything more than a trickle, a significant trend is being set.

A ban on fox-hunting will bring to the boil much that is simmering just below the surface. People will certainly go to prison, no doubt after some spectacular television pictures that will remind viewers more of the American West than routine policing, in protest against a specific injustice which for them symbolises a general ignorance and disregard for the place and way of life they know and understand. The slow death of an ancient horse-culture will begin, as the countryside becomes merely the space between cities, bounded by motorways, pipelines and pylons. Even though it is where they live and what they love, country people will begin to realise that the will of the urban majority and the votes they represent are all that really counts in this matter.

As farming and forestry go through unprecedented difficulties, these bills to ban fox-hunting, designed to appease that majority, will seem a step too far. A political measure that "works", is highly publicised, enjoys majority support and costs virtually nothing may seem like a good, progressive idea to the government.

In fact its price will be very high - near incalculable - as new and deep fissures open in our society.

But at least the owners of domestic pets will see a real benefit. The price of dog food will go down.

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