Ripping live animals apart is a wonderful British tradition that should be preseved.

[ItsAWonderfulCervix]

Let's overturn the ban. After all boxing day just isn't any fun without a few dead foxes and blood and guts and stuff.

And while we're at it, don't you just love a bit of badger baiting for variety When shredding foxes gets dull.

I have lived in the countryside for most of my life. I hate hunting and the superior bullshit arguments its proponents come out with. I'd be less offended if they just came out and said that they enjoyed chasing and killing things because it was fun.

I used to know someone ages ago who had a foxhound living in his house. It wasn't a dog for a novice owner, certainly, but it wasn't some sort of tortured hell-hound either. I've known collies and huskies that were far more trouble.

The hunts don't allow anyone non-hunt-affiliated to get close to their dogs (yes they are fucking dogs, hound is another word for a type of dog), so there is no objective data about their adaptability to non-working life. This person's dog had probably been stolen as a puppy, and its vet's records had it down as a " large beagle cross". Normally I'm totally against dog theft.

She is on the mend thank you Missp, hacking again but just not fit enough for hunting. Maybe next year. :)

Makes me laugh when I see talk of the 'evil baby attacking foxes'.

They are not evil. This is Anthropomorphism. They are animals without the very human quality of premeditated evil.

Hunting either controls foxes or it doesn't. They either catch 'very few' foxes or they do not. Cannot have it both ways.

If it was merely about pest control you wouldn't dress up in your pink coats, have your hunt balls, first blooding and whole social calendar around it. You'd go out in your old clothes and just get on with it much as farmers quietly get on with their own pest control.

And I was brought up a country girl not a 'townie'- the usual lame argument used by the Otis Ferry brigade against anybody daring to argue with them. My Uncles and aunts all own farms. My Grandfather was a farmer and my Father grew up on one. All of them are anti hunt, have banned the local hunts from their lands because they are a destructive, arrogant and not so countryside friendly as they want you to think (Many of them spend most of their time in town!) and I am thankful that very large swathes of the countryside where I grew up is now unwelcome to them. Many of their farming neighbours have also banned the hunt too because they are the most useless bunch of 'pest controllers' you'd ever wish to meet.

Oh and I grew up seeing what rats did to baby animals on a farm.

Maybe you'd like to dress up in your pink coats and chase them too?

You know- for pest control.

Foxes/badgers/hawks killed approximately 25 lambs on our farm last year and foxes killed approximately 20 chickens (actually only ate one chicken but they like killing the rest for fun too)....,foxes are shot to keep the numbers down....badgers/hawks are not allowed to be shot.

These are facts not opinion.

KingRollo, calm down, dear!

This 'debate' has gone the expected way then, hasn't it .
And where's the OP gone?

Hello Mig, merry Christmas . You've just posted exactly what I would have.

There is no benefit to fox hunting, the horses can get as much (and better) exercise from a drag, and there is no benefit to culling in this fashion over more humane and more accurate ways.

Oh, and I'm not a townie either.

Foxes don't kill for fun, they are opportunistic predators who store food when they can.

If you corral prey species and make it hard for them to escape, predators will come and take advantage. They just will.

Instead of accepting this simple fact and allowing for it in costings and the suchlike, the huntin' shootin' and fishin' lobby like to attribute all kinds of malicious intent to predatory species of all kinds, and invent all kinds of reasons to give them an excuse to kill large numbers of them. See also: the badger cull and bovine TB, the decline of songbirds and anti-corvid/bird of prey rhetoric, baby-mauling foxes, cat-eating foxes, bullshit stories of people being attacked by badgers (normally after they have mortally wounded the badger accidentally with a vehicle, when the truth is uncovered).

Their other shit logic includes the belief that shooting grey squirrels will magically bring back the forest habitat that red squirrels need to spread again. Greys live happily in parkland, reds don't. Also, bullshit stories about innocent little children breaking their ankles on mole burrows, which happens about as often as swans breaking people's arms with their wings.

Hunting is effective in controlling fox populations because it mimics predation. It disrupts them, stops them over-breeding and all the other impact of stopping foxes being top predators. That is why its effective even though not that many used to be killed.

Calling hunt coats pink is a fallacy. They are red.

Lots of the language ascribed to the behaviour of foxes is anthropomorphic twaddle, not 'fact'.

LtEve

Hope your Christmas was happy- YY to drag hunting.

Thesmallclanger Yes, Foxes don't have that anthropomorphic 'fun' thing going on. It is far more instinctive than that and yes, if you corral prey animals in one place you create a banquet. And if a fox goes crazy with instinct and kills more than it eats, well so be it. That is what some animals do. Check out Dolphins killing thousands of small fish they have no ability or intent to eat in the manner of the chase. Many species do this but because we have butted up against the natural home of the fox and they are adaptable enough to make the most of our dirty, wasteful and inefficient systems, we think it is okay to chase them through miles of countryside?

There is always loss in farming.

I know they are red FFS. But local hunts to us call them pink. 'Townies' call them red.

Meh, I just can't get worked up about hunting of animals which are not endangered. If I cared I'd be a vegetarian pet owner wearing plastic shoes. The whole hooha about hunting is really about class. Not so many people are up in arms about the terrible conditions in abbatoirs or puppy farms are they? Because people like eating meat and seeing cute dogs so who gives a shit, right? But a bunch of 'toffs' enjoying a hunt is so immoral it's worth getting in a froth about. Sorry, I think it's bollocks. By all means campaign for animal rights, but make sure you are sourcing all your meat, eggs, dairy, fish and leather goods from ethical sources first, or eschewing them altogether. Put your money where your mouth is. Cos it's not cool to moan on about damage done to animals in the 'cute' camp, while closing your eyes to horrors done to animals for which we have less cultural attachment.

"Top predators" are not meant to have predators themselves. It's debatable whether a fox is actually an apex predator anyway, but since all of our indigenous apex preds (apart from humans) have been hunted to extinction, it's hard to argue convincingly. As to "over-breeding", pred numbers fluctuate with prey availability and territorial pressures anyway.

But it is banned, right?

Oh, I also don't understand why it's so terrible to enjoy hunting, but it's ok to enjoy eating meat. Both forms of enjoyment are derived from the death of an animal, right?

Not a hunter by the way, just don't get why it's such an issue.

Some of us can be bothered about more than one issue Ginnel and do our best to put our money where our mouth is, looking for better ways of doing less harm. None of us is perfect but since when have foxes been 'cute'? I certainly wouldn't put them in that category and as an ardent complainer to ITV about 'I'm A Celebrity' and its cruel use of animals in its trials, I don't just do cute.

Hunting is effective in controlling fox populations because it mimics predation. It disrupts them, stops them over-breeding and all the other impact of stopping foxes being top predators. That is why its effective even though not that many used to be killed.
There seems to be no empirical evidence of such.

The whole hooha about hunting is really about class. Bollocks.
Great granddaughter of Lords, both sides.

Think its horrific.

Exactly- nothing to do with class. I should be pro hunting from my background. I am not.

Yes, of course Mignonette. But the debate about fox hunting seems to eclipse other animal right issues to a fairly large degree, and I think that a lot of the upset about it comes from people who don't really care that much about animal rights in general - because if they did then there would be a lot more high-profile lobbying about other animal rights issues. I find it puzzling, I really do. It makes me cross that class still plays such a central role in causing people to get upset about things. And I dislike the whole 'oh hunting is fine, but not if they enjoy it' argument, because that surely applies to fishing and a whole host of other activities which don't cause such upset amongst the wider population.

Basically I think the furore aroundfox hunting is hugely disproportionate, and it exists purely because it polarises people along class lines. And that, in turn, is disappointing.

I think this is a reverse. Fwiw.

GinnelsandWhippets

It's the manner of the death that is in question. IMHO if an animal has to be killed for whatever reason it should be in the most humane way possible.