VOICES FROM THE WORLD OF HUNTING

Whenever I hear celebrity broadcaster Chris Packham railing against hunting with dogs, I am reminded of former Prime Minister John Major’s comment about Sir Richard Body, rebellious Eurosceptic Tory MP and breeder of pigs and bloodhounds. “When I hear the name Body I hear the sound of white coats flapping,” Major exclaimed in exasperation during one of the Maastricht debates.

Watching Packham hurling violent hyperboles at the camera while following a hunt in Dorset I half expected a couple of chaps in white coats to jump out from behind a tree and cart him off to an appropriate institution, by which I don’t mean the BBC. “It’s like I’ve got a Tardis and gone back in time to an ancient mediaeval savagery,” he said as he followed the Blackmore and Sparkford Vale Hunt, “where a bunch of entitled lunatics, possibly sociopaths and psychopaths, are riding around the countryside taking vicarious pleasure out of chasing wildlife and then watching it get torn to pieces by dogs.” 

The hunt, unless he could prove otherwise, was actually trail hunting, with hounds pursuing a pre-laid trail rather than live foxes. Which is not to deny that four people associated with the hunt were successfully prosecuted under the 2004 Hunting Act for hunting a live fox in 2025. But the point I’m making here is to do with his blanket denigration of everybody who follows a hunt as “ethically and morally bankrupt sociopathic savages.” True, some individuals have broken the law and been prosecuted for doing so, but the vast majority of people who hunt or follow hunts do not break, and have not broken, the law.

At one point, Packham opined: “The most tragic thing we are likely to see today is that young woman on a horse. What on earth goes on through these adult minds?”

Listen to the Unheard

Did he bother to stop and chat to that young woman, or has he spent any time in respectful conversation with people who hunt? I doubt it. That young woman on a horse might have been a carer or a vet or a substance misuse worker – like three of the hunting women I recently interviewed, and whose profiles feature in Real Lives, Real Voices: In Defence of Liberty, Livelihoods and Hunting within the Law, which is published this week.

Many of the MPs who voted for the 2004 Hunting Act, which effectively banned most forms of hunting, saw themselves as the tribunes elected by the plebs to take on the toffs. Like Packham, they didn’t even have the decency to visit hunts, talk to hunters or try to understand their world before proscribing it. The view expressed by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who typecast hunters as bloodthirsty toffs on horseback, is still held by many left-wing MPs, and completely misrepresents the world of hunting.

In its 2024 manifesto, Change, the Labour Party vowed to ban trail hunting on the grounds that many hunts were using it as a smokescreen for pursuing live quarry. A consultation to determine how this will be done is about to begin in parliament. The pledge has little to do with wild animal welfare and a great deal to do with false perceptions about the people who hunt.

Saving trail hunting

In November 2023, I wrote in these pages about how the 2004 Hunting Act had been a disaster for the fox, the brown hare and the red deer in the West Country. Instead of making life better for the quarry species, it had made life worse. These were the findings of the Rural Wrongs Project, established by myself and Jim Barrington, a former director of the League Against Cruel Sports and now animal welfare adviser to the Countryside Alliance.

In Rural Wrongs: Hunting and the Unintended Consequences of Bad Law, we argued that the Hunting Act should be repealed and replaced with something similar to the Welfare of Animals Act (Northern Ireland) 1972, which granted protection not only to domestic and captive animals but to all animals, including hunted species such as the fox, hare and deer. Under the 1972 law, hunting, coursing and fishing were exempt, unless they involved activities which caused “unnecessary suffering”.

Under the current government, this is clearly not going to happen, and any talk of repealing the Hunting Act, or for that matter getting protected status for wild quarry hunting on the grounds that it is part of our intangible cultural heritage, is strictly for the birds. At the moment there is only one game in town: convincing politicians that they should not ban trail hunting or get rid of any of the exemptions which allow limited forms of hunting to continue.

The We Are Hunting project

One of the ways I believe that we can do this is by showing that the vast majority of people involved in hunting are not behaving illegally, and that they are neither bloodthirsty toffs, nor Packham’s “morally bankrupt sociopathic savages”. That’s why Christophe Gailly de Taurines and I established the We Are Hunting project in 2024.

Christophe, who hunts with the Warwickshire, got in touch after he heard me speak at the annual dinner of the RS Surtees Society. The chairman had asked me to talk about Rural Wrongs, which the Society had published, in an amusing and entertaining way. But there was nothing amusing to be said about the impact of the Hunting Act, so I talked instead about the pleasure I had had over the last 30 or so years dipping in and out of the hunting world.

I suggested to the audience that hunters needed to do far more to show politicians and others antipathetic to their activities that they have a distinct culture stretching back centuries, that their activities involve a great range of people from different professions and classes, and that the hunts are a great force for the good in terms of community cohesion and providing entertainment in rural areas.

Christophe and I decided to produced material which could be used by the Countryside Alliance, the British Hound Sports Association (BHSA) and others to convince politicians that banning trail hunting would be a disaster, and that the popular stereotype of hunters as members of the wealthy elite is nonsense. We joined forces with my old colleague Jim Barrington, the advertising executive Neil Kennedy, who helped to establish the Countryside Alliance, and the photographer Nico Morgan.

So far we have produced the book Real Lives, Real Voices; a shorter pictorial version, Real Voices: Dispatches from the World of Hunting; and a 10-minute film which you can watch on YouTube (Hunting The Facts - A film about trail hunting people).

Saving hunting culture

“They came from various places, and various walks of life, but they all had the same destination,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Like the 30 pilgrims embarking on a journey to visit the shrine of St Thomas Becket over 600 years ago, the 30-odd hunting people whose testimony you can read in Real Lives, Real Voices represent a great many trades and professions, from undertaker to underwriter, farrier to philosopher, groom to gardener, barrister to builder. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, they share a common purpose. Trail hunting has enabled hunts to retain their infrastructure, membership and traditions within the confines of the law. They want to save it.

Were all forms of hunting to be banned, some 12,000 hounds would be surplus to requirements. Inevitably, many would be put down. Several thousand hunting horses would also be out of a job, and at least 500 people who are directly employed by the hunts who lose their jobs and homes. There would also be a serious knock-on effect on farriers, feed merchants, grooms and others associated with the hunting world.

Each of the conversations I had was about a slice of life: how people became involved with hunts, why they love hunting, what it means to them economically and socially, how hunting fits in with the trades or professions they practise. One of the things I hadn’t expected, but heard much about, was how important hunting is for many people’s mental health, especially for those who have difficult jobs in the caring professions.

Travel around the world of hunting today and you will be struck by a pervasive sense of fear and bemusement. Fear, because hunting people feel demonised. For the most part, they have obeyed the 2004 Hunting Act, yet the Labour Party has now pledged to outlaw trail hunting because some have broken the law. We don’t ban driving because of the carnage caused by drunk driving: we enforce the law and punish the guilty. Likewise, if individuals flout the Hunting Act, the law should be used to hold them to account.

Bemusement, because those involved in countryside business ventures – and all hunts are small businesses – are already threatened by new policies, including an increase in the national insurance contributions they must pay; the government’s decision to stop accepting new admissions for the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme; the latest restrictions on inheritance tax relief for farmers; and plans to dramatically expand the area of agricultural land devoted to solar energy production. As Baroness Mallalieu, chair of the Countryside Alliance, has said of the Labour party: “We are almost becoming the cruel party.”

Liberty matters

The Labour Party has certainly become the illiberal party, being depressingly cavalier with our traditional freedoms. Since it came to power, it has introduced, or threatened to introduce, a whole suite of measures which could diminish our liberties. These range from the introduction of identity cards and face recognition technologies in public places to a possible assault on the jury system, whose core principle that individuals should be judged by their peers dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215. There are also significant concerns about the erosion of free speech.

To ban trail hunting would be another deeply illiberal measure, explicitly designed to prevent people from freely associating in pursuit of a lawful activity. A ban, as you will discover if you read Real Lives, Real Voices, would lead in many areas – as one of the people we interviewed told us – to mass depression. And it wouldn’t do a jot of good for wild animal welfare.

Real Lives, Real Voices can be bought at: https://wearehunting.com/product/real-lives-real-voices/