Trail hunting ban - would you hunt the "clean boot"?

[BootHunter]

Horsey people - with the talk of an upcoming ban on trail hunting, would you consider joining a clean boot hunt as an alternative?

YANBU - Yes
YANBU - No

IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRAIL HUNTING AND CLEAN BOOT HUNTING THEN GOOGLE IT!

I'm a horse owner but I do not hunt because all there is locally to me is "trail hunting" packs. However, if there was a legitimate bloodhound pack hunting human quarry then I absolutely would join, and I can think of several friends who would too.

I personally feel that this could be a great opportunity for the local hunts to evolve into something that more people want to take part in, and probably the only thing that will stop the whole industry from closing down altogether.

Around us the farmers let the hunt on their land as they offer a service disposing of their dead stock (dog feed), without this service the farmer has to pay for the disposal. This is the main reason farmers allow them on their land. A clean hunt doesn't benefit the farmer in any way, the horses and people will just chew up the land.

The hunt around us used to be 100 people on a hunt day, these days it is 40 most and they hunt less regularly. As a sport it's on its knees.

Few hunts butcher and feed dead animals to their hounds these days they are generally fed kibble. Most dead stock is incinerated and the hunt either has an incinerator or pays a commercial incinerator as a cost of getting access to farm land to ride across. Some drag hunts offer the same service. Farmers in areas with no hunt (very large areas of the country, a fact hunts like to ignore) or those who do not want the hunt on their land (more common than hunts like to suggest) pay a knacker service which also incinerates the carcasses.

I speak for me and the many people I know in our rural community.

That’s bizarre that you would help to threaten the livelihoods of pubs that host legal hunts. Your sense of righteousness is misplaced.

I’m guessing you put at least equal effort into boycotting business that use halal meat?

I can put my money wherever I want, and I'm likely to feel more comfortable in a pub whose values align with mine in that respect.

As for halal meat- from where I'm standing as a vegetarian I see the slaughter and consumption of all animals unacceptably cruel and pointless, and those frothing only about the animals eaten by brown people as hypocrites- or worse.

I’m an animal lover. My Gundogs are my life - and they are spoiled rotten animals currently snoozing on the sofa! We shoot and bush beat through shooting season. We are lucky enough to eat a huge amount of game - pheasants/partridges/duck mainly but also venison from the estate we live on. We shoot/dress/butcher the game ourselves.
i would bet that most of the people who oppose our way of living couldn’t tell the difference between a partridge and a woodcock, let alone know their habits, life cycle and flight patterns. They wouldn’t know that pheasants fly at approx 45 miles an hour or run at 10. They wouldn’t spend hours feeding round, making sure their habitat is safe and good for them, or be out training the dogs for hours in all weathers. They wouldn’t have a clue about the equilibrium of the natural world that surrounds them or the history of it. They trot off happily to McDonald’s, or to buy cheap chicken from Tesco's wearing cheap leather boots and think we’re the ones with the problem.
I used to hunt - I don’t anymore as I no longer ride, but I was a hunt groom for years. I don’t have anything to do with the local hunt anymore and I’m not invested in them, however I recognise that this ban is just another slow tightening of the screw Labour is placing through the countryside. For that reason people should wake up - rural life is NOT urban life and systematically dismantling it will have ramifications you haven’t even considered.
the bloodhounds are a bloody good option for people too - they give a good ride. Drag hunting is fast and furious.

Agree
Especially since the poster only mentioned halal.

Conveniently forgetting that 88% of animals killed for halal meat are stunned before slaughter
whilst

no animals killed for kosher meat are stunned !!

I get that you're feeling threatened, I think you have caused to be, and I'm sorry about that.

But a primary reason why you know all the stuff you know is because you want the birds to be healthy so that you can shoot them. Shoots deliberately breed birds to have them available to shoot.

I don't know any other activity where it would be legal to shoot an animal knowing that it is likely not to be killed outright, send a dog to fetch it to carry it to a human to wring its neck. In any other context that would be prosecuted as animal abuse.

Bloodhounds are continuing. If trail hunting had not been widely abused to hunt fox, either by laying no trail or by laying such a weak trail that the hounds would inevitably follow live fox if they came across it, then it would not now be being banned.

The fox hunters are to blame, not Labour.

No, if it were me I would rather spend the time seeing a therapist to try and understand why I have a need to hunt anything, be it defenceless animals or a clean boot.

I'm laughing at the thought that you think I would need a therapist to understand why I want to ride a horse to follow a cross country runner being chased by a pack of lolloping hounds with the runner, the hounds, the horse and me all having the time of our lives in the fresh air.

It WAS my therapy!

@Imdunferyep, I’m very well aware of how shooting works. And 90% of the time the birds are picked up dead, my dogs are trained to quickly retrieve any pricked birds to be humanly dispatched (I don’t wrong necks. I carry a bird dispatcher.). And that is really, really something no one who eats meat has any right to object too as I’ve seen inside meat factories and slaughterhouses and I know what I would pick if I were a bird!
I have my beliefs. You have yours. With respect you won’t change my mind and I’m sure I won’t change yours. I just wanted to put my opinion and view the same as anyone.
i will say with absolute certainly though that I am 100% sure I know more about hunting and shooting than the majority of posters on this board - from my perspective of course.
yes I just popped a note about bloodhounding in as a separate aside, badly written by its Christmas and I’m losing my touch! It’s not hunting as it was, but it is a good activity.

You don’t know what hunting the clean boot is, do you…!

its a pack of hounds following the scent of a long distance runner! They generally run 3 ‘lines’ before a break and 2 after it. They catch him every time and he suffers the awful fate of being licked 😂. They never riot onto foxes etc as they are trained to follow the scent of a human, just as foxhounds follow the scent of a fox.

Not ‘conveniently forgetting’ anything but it is a small minority of total non stun slaughter and majority is for halal and that is only going to increase but if it makes you happy, I do include all non stun slaughter.

So pp’s self righteousness about threatening the livelihood of rural pubs that have a different view and yours are based on an incorrect premise.

Don't start with all this patronising "War on rural communities" crap. You don't speak for us.

I’m not sure who you mean by ‘us’. You seem rather anti many rural activities.

As farming animals for meat is very much part of rural communities, as a vegetarian are you saying you would happily see that sort of farming shut down and the millions of animals slaughtered?

I’m talking about ALL non stun slaughter - your poor attempt at a gotcha is poor.

I presume when trail hunting’ has been banned the next thing will be to ban shooting and then fishing.

I imagine so.

Interestingly for all these animal lovers, there has been no mention of the killing and maiming approximately 2.4 million farm animals in 2023, and there are no calls for a ban on walking pet dogs in the countryside.

To give some perspective to the anti legal hunt posters, there were 61 confirmed kills of foxes by trail hunts across 2 years.

I think anyone who is pro allowing people to walk their dogs on farmland causing millions of ‘accidental’ kills but anti legal trail hunting has some very odd priorities.

It's hard to take the government seriously with their 'animal lovers' narrative with their games around animal testing, which is outdated and more often than not scientifically useless. They publicly say they're working towards stopping it, then though the back door are trying to sneak animal testing in as 'essential infrastructure' to the public order act to make peaceful protest illegal.

MBR acres in Cambridgeshire breeds thousands of beagles in poor conditions, which are sent out in vans to labs across the country - they also sell the dogs blood and organs, and have an onsite 'terminal bleeding license' - which is exactly what it sounds like. Camp Beagle have been living on the roadside outside of the gates for over 4 years in a legal peaceful protest, trying to raise awareness, the government are trying to make the protest illegal whilst telling the public that they are working to stop animal testing.

Dog walkers should have their dogs on leads
No one should kill animals
No ones mentioning other animals on this thread because it’s about trail hunting

Killing animals for sport is unforgivable.

Do you know what Trail hunting or clean boot hunting is? They are not killing animals for sport.

I just thought it an interesting juxtaposition that people are so bothered about about 61 foxes mistakenly killed by hunts over 2 years (remember that the vast majority of hunts stay well within the law) that they are happy to destroy livelihoods and tradition whereas not a peep about 2.4 MILLION farm animals mistakenly killed in the most brutal ways (run off cliffs, throats ripped out, guts ripped out etc) by pet dogs in one year. Not to mention the 64000 other dogs and a handful of humans. Every year.

It is rather disproportionate and you can see why this feels like a (perceived) classist war on the countryside including many farmers.

My post was responding to issues you raised in yours if you read your own pp

The MFHA is either utterly incompetent or won’t acknowledge the facts, because “Hunting: A Case for Change” destroys hunting’s version of events. The total of 15,180 meets includes 2000+ hare hunting meets, but looking at fox hunting alone of the around 13,000 fox hunts that were recorded during August 22 and April 23 ie nine months of the year at least
3478 (and as many as 5217) foxes were chased or killed by hunts registered to the MFHA itself !!

The Report picks out two hunts that are notorious for breaking the law. The statistics for just one of those hunts, the Warwickshire, are remarkable. This Hunt (which was placed under a Community Protection Notice for continual anti-social behaviour in December 2022 so ‘missed’ a few meets around then) rode out an estimated 130 times throughout the ‘hunting season’ including many ‘cubbing’ meets where the Hunt focussed on killing fox cubs.
As the Report says,
“The Warwickshire Hunt chased multiple foxes during some meets. As a result, the figures…represent 29 meets throughout the season. That means 22.3% of the Warwickshire Hunt’s meets resulted in some sort of chase or kill. Most if not all of these would have been under criminal circumstances.”

Protect the Wild compiles a yearly report of incidents such as wildlife persecution observed by the hunt saboteurs and monitors attending hunting meets.
They only attend a tiny tiny proportion of the 12/15000 meets

The pre-season figures for 2024 show 330 recorded incidents of all kinds, including animal deaths and violence.

The UK hunting season begins in late October or early November. This is preceded by around three months of “autumn hunting,” or “cubbing,” during which staff train new hounds by specifically pursuing young foxes and hares.

In 2024 that three-month period saw hunts chase 47 foxes and kill three.
They also chased nine hares and killed one.
Monitors observed 52 incidents of hunts chasing deer and 13 incidents of hunts killing them. Hunts also interfered with badger sets 11 times.

Again hunt monitors do not follow all hunts so this is a gross underestimate of the reality

A separate Protect the Wild reportfrom September found that nearly
600 wild animals were chased or killed during the 2023 to 2024 hunting season.
Both reports found that there are incidents of some kind at the majority of hunting meets.

However, only a fraction of the nearly 20,000 hunting days in a season are witnessed by members of the public

and then there’s the road chaos and danger to members of the public

What a lot of googling and cut/paste to say not very much.

Does it not sound remotely disproportionate to you most hunts operate entirely within the law but because a few don’t (or get it wrong), everyone is happy to demonise a whole rural industry and destroy it completely with loss of jobs and killing more animals no longer needed?

Whereas 2.4 million farm animals are killed in horrendous ways by pet dogs and nobody bats an eyelid? Do you seriously have no problem with the selectiveness of the supposed ‘anti’ animal cruelty views of many?

"Entirely within the law" is an interesting concept in this case, though.

The law was framed in order not to criminalise a huntsman whose hounds accidentally light on live fox scent and chase a fox and kill it.

Many hunts hunting "entirely within the law" are quite deliberately laying an extremely weak scent, and using the excuse that in order to keep things feeling real they don't tell the huntsman where the trails are laid.

So when the huntsman fails to call off the hounds from following a live fox scent in the wrong direction, he can plausibly deny legal responsibility for hunting a fox.

Any hunt serious about not hunting fox would not use fox pee for their trail. Drag hunts use fox hounds to follow aniseed. The same dogs. No hound alive at the time the act was passed is hunting now. Entire new packs have been trained on fox pee.

The intent is obvious.

Oscar Wilde still has it right! 2025 and this still goes on.

I’m not aware people have selective attitudes to animal cruelty
Wheres the evidence for that comment

It is not the case that most hunts act within the law
Do you have evidence of that

So let’s take your figure of 61 kills over two years and do the maths

In 2024 there were 143 monitored hunts out of between 12000-15000 hunts a year

Average hunts = 13500
30.5 foxes ( not inc other animals ) killed / year in 143 monitored hunts

13500/143 =94.406
94.406x30.5=2,879.383 foxes killed on the average number

However
As monitored hunts will be more careful than those unmonitored the average will be higher !!

The max number on15000 hunts
15000/143=104.895
104.895x30.5=3199.3 foxes killed
Again this number is a minimum

Plus the 3000 hounds killed per year that Countryside Alliance are prepared to admit to

These figures do not include other wild animals and pets or fox cubs killed in so called young hound training exercises

There is no doubt at all that large numbers of foxes and other animals are illegally killed for sport by the hunt
That’s why it’s banned and why further measures are being put in place to stop the hunt ignoring the law

If clean boot hunting is a completely safe way for people to enjoy riding horses then good.
If it isn’t then riding out just with horses on a hack will be the next best thing.