So it looks like fox hunting as a sport is finished. I believe the countryside as a whole will eventually regret this particular piece of legislation and I say this assuming the police or whoever is supposed to enforce it is able to do so. It is also against the law to mistreat badgers and other animals, to abuse children, to misuse drugs and to drive whist drunk. This is just a short list of offences in no particular order that seem to go unpunished in so many cases.

Let me state equivocably here and now that I do not have, nor have I ever had, any desire to chase foxes on horseback, or on foot for that matter. There are, we are all aware, many influential people who do and are prepared to spend a lot of money in that persuit, what will happen to the counrtyside when that money goes elsewhere. Fox hunting supports many small countryside businesses.

Foxes are part of the British environment and have benefited from being hunted because some farmers have treated them in a special way because either they, their landlords or good friends wish to hunt them. They have left part of their land wooded to provide shelter and they have refrained from shooting,trapping or poisoning what is after all a livestock eating pest. Foxes have prospered from this protection and the countryside is more picturesque.

I don’t like the idea of running some poor creature to ground with dogs and tearing it to pieces, it is unpleasant but so is nature in many more brutal ways. The fox lived by the sword and died by it also, I will not use the word cruel in conection with an animal as I only apply that word to human suffering and believe me, in my twenty odd years as a policeman I have seen my share of human cruelty. There are much more barbaric acts committed in the everyday production of our food and in our treatment of other human beings that require the anger and disgust squandered on fox hunting.

I feel that the underlying dislike for fox hunting in some quarters is not just about the cruelty to foxes but also to perhaps to a larger extent about the perceived privileged classes who indulge in it. I am a socialist at heart, a diffcult thing to be in the police force of the eighties, but I am not critical of the toffs who hunt - all that inbreeding, being sent to boarding school at the age of seven and on to public school with the bullying in an all male preserve is bound to generate some aberrant behaviour. At least while they’re chasing foxes they are not mucking about with us peasants.

The prohunting lobby seemed to use the wrong argument in their defence, they claimed to be controlling the poulation of foxes which are of course a pest (perhaps the occupants of Tower Hamlet council estates have failed to consider this). Anyone who drives on the roads in the countryside knows that far more foxes are killed on the roads each week than are killed by all the hunts in the country in a year. All with no apparent effect on the population of foxes. The foxes run down on the roads suffer and a percentage must crawl off injured and die a miserable slow death, is anybody demonstrating to ban the motor car?

If there was unneccessary cruelty in hunting then surely monitoring and licensing is the answer and if that would have been too difficult to enforce then so will the ban be.

I have already mentioned that I am a retired police officer but I am also a recovering alcoholic and have seen much suffering caused by the misuse of alcohol, I no longer use this drug but I know that it plays a large part in many crimes and has a major influence on those who commit crimes such as murder, rape, serious assaults and child abuse. A ban on alcohol is of course out of the question but in my eyes is more justified than one on fox hunting.

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