Husband is insistent on joining trail hunt tomorrow

[FairViewRosie25]

Not happy. I know they trail hunt but they still take dogs and have their fair share of the sabs.

But the difference is whether they’re done for direct pleasure or not

No, you've rather missed a large point. This is one difference, but one of many.

Moreover, practices such as pet ownership and meat-eating are far from uncontroversial.

It most certainly is.

Also spot on!

Investigate the people using trail hunting “as a smoke screen” and prosecute. Don’t ban an entire group of law abiding citizens from their centuries old sport.

As a vegan I’m not going to defend meat eating (which is not necessary for health, people do it for pleasure).

Eliminating destructive / disease carrying vermin from one’s home I don’t think is a fair comparison to killing animals for pleasure.

There are hundreds of cases of photographic / drone evidence of “trail hunts” intentionally going after foxe, digging them out when they’ve gone to ground etc. Trail hunts. What is the necessity of this? Why are they even carrying spades ?! Why is this result pleasurable to anyone? Why not just meet up with pals and go for nice horse ride without the hounds specifically trained to hunt down and kill foxes? Tradition? Does that make bull fighting okay? Dog fighting?

And before anyone says it, I do live in the countryside and know a lot of farmers etc etc.

Just because something has been going on for centuries, does not mean it should continue.

Sadly, prosecutions are not as simple as that (if they were our rape statistics would look wildly different). The ban on trail hunting addresses loop holes which the 2004 act left open. Closing them is not a 'Bad Thing'.

For the sake of this thread, let's continue to call this sort of hunting an industry. When an industry is aware of widespread and abhorrent practices but does nothing to curb them over 20+ years, then crying "but what about us innocents" is both weak and cowardly.

The industry neglected its responsibility and now must take the consequences.

It’s a thread about trail hunting which clearly does often involve the killing of foxes and other wildlife, yet you cannot answer a simple question of whether or not you support it. Which is what the whole thread is about.

Instead you have brought up every ludicrous comparison from cats killing birds to Rentokill to detract from the point which seems to be you support this sport. Why do you support it? It isn’t necessary.

Ah
Interesting to see that figure mentioned again out of only 143 monitored hunts when there are actually 12,000 to 15,000 hunts a year.

So that’s 3000 to 3200 foxes killed every year in these so called no kill trail hunts. That’s an absolute minimum as it’s logical that hunts are more cautious when being monitored

Lets not forget the road accidents caused
deer and badger kills and the the fox cub killing by the hunt before the official season even starts

Very difficult for me here.
I was brought up riding on boxing day and 'catching the fox', good old Cornish Maid at aged 5 following the hunt master. Family getting pissed up at Jamaica Inn. This was the norm.
I agree, some foxes are savage and kill farmers livestock. However, that's life and Farmers need to secure their animals.
I'm a Barbour lover, something that seems fashionable now and all youngsters wear it, I just love it as my boots are 15 years old and my wax jacket has only needed a rewax once.
What I don't agree with is how the dogs are treated, it's shameful. What I will say when I hunted it was the lame fox that would get caught, all the babies used to escape and be free. I do not agree with this anymore as a grown up human being. It's a sign of arrogant wealth and huge shock - there is no such thing as a trail hunt. Hate seeing farmers lose their wildlife efc but this is barbaric, search up hunt dogs, it's shocking. I know I used to love the chase as a child and it always brings back nostalgia, that's not what it is now.

Hunting rabbits with dogs is generally illegal under the Hunting Act 2004 which bans using dogs to hunt wild mammals like rabbits, unless specific exemptions apply, such as flushing them for pest control (using only two dogs or under strict license) and the rabbits must then be shot not ripped apart by the dogs

The core act of chasing/killing with dogs is banned

i think it’s barbaric to go hunt tigers.
And to smile ear-to-ear while holding the limp, dead body of a beautiful leopard.
Or again, to pose with a slain elephant’s tail and think you’re *the great white hunter.”
You’re a POS, both of you.
And so is your father, Don Jr. & Eric.
Ashes, ashes we all fall down.

This for one of our local hunts is exactly it, a smokescreen. And tbh they have brought the ban upon themselves by not hunting within the law. I would 100% support the ban if it wasn’t for the fact our other local hunt prove that you can operate a trail hunt within the law where hounds are under control. The fact that there was ‘only’ 1.33 foxes per hunt killed last season proves this, the majority of hunts won’t have killed or chased any foxes, the ones with arseholes running them will have killed a damn sight more.

We don't follow fox hunting, we follow trail hunting.

It's nothing to do with being posh, it's a big part of the farming / countryside community. However, I suspect a lot of people are against trail hunting because it's seen as a "posh" event & it's ok to dislike Barbour wearing countryside folk, in a way that it's not acceptable to say you dislike tracksuit wearing people on estates?

But the hunts don’t operate outside of their seasons so 61 kills over a two year period is perfectly valid and can be directly compared with 48,000 farm animals killed by pet dogs over the same time period (I have corrected my previous figures).

All the rest is assumption and can also be applied directly to the havoc, injury and mental distress caused by pet dogs that is not included in the kill figures.

Nobody is demonising all dog owners for the terrible behaviour of some (quite a few) and saying that they should end their marriage, yet PPs feel very comfortable demonising and dehumanising a whole group of people not to mention happily turning a blind eye to the mass slaughter of millions of animals without stunning for meat consumption on religious grounds.

It is very selective.

Yes, seeing some of the comments on here, some think i’s all about posh entitled people whereas the reality is far from it. It seems that many have no idea what they are talking about but just want to demonise a group of people to make themselves feel righteous.

So like many others, you are happy to demonise a whole group and destroy livelihoods, businesses and thousands of animals for the actions if a few.

Will you also be supporting a campaign to ban people walking their dogs on farmland to save the 24,000+ (I’ve clarified the figures from earlier) farm animals per year killed by pet dogs? Or should we not penalise all dog owners for the negligence and ignorance of a ‘few’?

They are not killing wild animals. We are talking about trail hunting, they follow a trail. HTH.

I did provide links upthread.

I corrected my earlier numbers, it is 24,000 farm animals per year plus 64,000 other dogs and a few humans. The League Against Cruel Sports reported 61 confirmed kills of a fox in 2 years.

It is a huge problem around here with ignorant and negligent dog owners letting their dogs kill. Should we demonise all dog owners and ban all dog walking on farmland to deal with this?

I am not attacking dog owners but I am trying to highlight the total selective nature of people who for some reason are desperately worried about some foxes being killed yet ignore tens of thousands of farm animals killed in similar circumstances. It comes across very much like hypocrisy.

www.nfuonline.com/updates-and-information/nfu-mutual-livestock-worrying-statistics/

TBH, the ‘these things will happen’ attitude is also pretty common with cat owners.

Last month, our neighbour’s cat killed three song birds in our garden. No bell. They don’t seem to find it a problem.

But no one is advocating for a ban on walking pet dogs in farmland, dehumanising and demonising all dog owners or suggesting that spouses of people who walk their dogs off the lead in farmland should end their marriage.

Everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says ‘I don’t condone that’ and gets on with their day.

I am pointing out the glaring double standards here in people’s sensitivity to which animals are being unlawfully killed.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻THIS

Yes they are. Trail hunts routinely end in the savage killing of foxes, and not by accident. You know this perfectly well.

Do people eat fox ?! News to me!

Well put.

I think the anti hunt people are also making all sorts of unfounded and nasty assumptions about people doing it and ‘revelling in’ or ‘enjoying’ the kill.

This is clearly not the main driver of participating in a hunt for the majority as the popularity of legal trail hunts shows. It is mostly about people in rural areas getting together for a good run of the horses with friends and some fresh air. They are utilising the existing structures of the hunting industry which has existed for years to do this.

Now farmers and landowners have to use alternative methods to cull foxes (and other animals with few natural predators like deer) so for all the worrying of the anti hunt people, I imagine that the same number of foxes get killed anyway, just by different means.

No I don’t. The vast majority operate legally.