Society
I didn't care about foxes being hunted until I learned that they crawl into drainage pipes to escape the dogs
Published 24 April 2000
The other day, a hunt rode past our garden. Such a sight - the flash of a scarlet coat, the thumping of hooves, the barking of the pack, the blast of the hunting horn, the cries of "View Haloo" - is supposed to provoke one of two responses.
The first is that stirring in the breast of an Englishman which is also elicited by the sound of leather on willow across a village green. I once interviewed Roger Scruton, and the fact that he had inherited Enoch Powell's hunting outfit was a matter of great symbolic, almost sacramental, meaning. Not so much like getting somebody's old football boots; more like drawing Excalibur from the stone.
The other response is meant to be rage at this ritual of cruelty and decadence, this tormenting of a beautiful animal for the benefit of a few toffs.
This hunt - the first I have ever seen - looked simply farcical. There was no fox anywhere, not that the riders were any threat to anybody but themselves and a few innocent bystanders, since they were riding in all directions, across fields, clattering along the road. Somebody was blowing a horn, not because a fox was in sight, but in a hapless and ineffectual attempt to assemble the scattered riders. The dogs were completely out of control. A couple of them caught the scent of a rabbit and pursued it towards the horizon (it got through a hedge and escaped). If this - as some defenders say - is a necessary means of keeping down the numbers of foxes, then I can't believe it's a very effective one.
My own view about the controversy, which wasn't altered by moving from central London to rural Suffolk, was that it wasn't worth bothering about very much. It was an absolutely marginal part of British life, and I couldn't seen why it had taken on this importance, either for or against, in British life. It just goes on and on.
Now it has emerged that there is a plot to take over the RSPCA and turn it into a pro-hunting organisation. Entryism may be dead in the Labour Party, but it seems to be alive and well in Middle England. I've generally found it hard to get worked up. The claims about swathing Rover-level job losses in the countryside were obviously rubbish, but on the other hand, was the suffering involved in fox-hunting of much special importance? After all, animals get hunted by other animals, don't they?
This week, I happened to meet a biologist who has researched the effects of hunting on animals. First, he had looked at the effects of stag-hunting on the stag itself. Like me, he had assumed at first that the effect on a stag would be not much different from being chased by another animal. The researchers found that the pursuit of a deer by wolves would last for a few minutes. By contrast, dogs and riders would chase a deer for 12 miles or more. Deer would die of stress during the pursuit. It was the report on these findings that persuaded the National Trust to ban deer-hunting on its land.
He has now turned to fox-hunting, and he mentioned one piece of evidence that suggests the stress a hunted fox is under. During some hunts, foxes have crawled into drainage pipes in order to escape the dogs. Obviously, this will virtually always be fatal, since the fox cannot turn around in the pipe and is unlikely to walk out backwards. These pipes become blocked and there was a report, back in the 1950s (it appeared in Country Life) of a pipe being found with 11 dead foxes in it.
This is one of those facts you wish you hadn't heard, but, if accepted, it does suggest the level of fear that the fox is under. Imagine trying to persuade a fox or a dog to run into a narrow pipe.
Maybe this evidence is irrelevant. The qualms that we have about animal suffering are demonstrably a matter of culture and history. In his book Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas cites the once common practice of stuffing human effigies with live kittens. The point was that, when you set it alight on the bonfire, you would get a sound of screaming that would add to the verisimilitude. Most amusing, it was thought at the time.
My position on fox-hunting hasn't exactly collapsed, but there are alarming preliminary signs of subsidence. Inconvenient evidence is so irritating, isn't it? "An open mind is like an open sewer," Billy Graham once said, and I think he had a point. You wouldn't want to contemplate the things that float through my mind.
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