In March 2015 I wrote a piece for the Guardian explaining why I was still sabotaging fox hunts 10 years after they were officially banned. Almost three years later, the situation is worse than ever. On Boxing Day, the biggest day in the hunting calendar, there were reports of four kills by hunts, and probably many more that we don’t yet know about. We also know of two horses that died during the day’s hunts, while at least one poor hound was killed after being hit by a car in south Wales.
If this is how hunts behave when the media spotlight is on them, imagine what hunt saboteurs see during the rest of the hunting season, when we are the only witnesses. Hunts flout the ban with impunity, and attempts to stop them are frequently met with violence.
Why has this been allowed to happen? Why are organised gangs permitted to rampage across the countryside and openly flout the law without consequence? And what needs to be done to stop them?
The Hunting Act doesn’t work because it was created as deliberately flawed legislation. Tony Blair did that popular politician’s trick of trying to please all of the people all of the time, and ended up pleasing no one. Loopholes were left in to appease various groups – the bird of prey clause, for example, which fails to prohibit hawking.
Some of these loopholes have been cynically exploited. Hunts, for example, have invented the magical concept of “trail hunting”. These two words give them carte blanche, and if anyone ever questions it, their response is: “But we were just following a trail.” That these trails are apparently laid using fox urine may explain why there are so many “accidents” in which foxes are killed. Why would hunts deliberately train their hounds to follow the scent of a live animal if they were genuinely intending to obey the law?
Quite why terrier men, traditionally used for digging out foxes from holes, are needed for trail hunting is also unclear. Terrier work has rightly been banned on National Trust land, and there is talk of it being outlawed in Scotland. Perhaps the environment secretary, Michael Gove, can show how much he cares for dogs and wildlife by working towards a UK-wide ban.
The bare minimum that needs to be done is that the Hunting Act must be strengthened and the loopholes closed. Hunt supporters claim that the law doesn’t work, and therefore should be scrapped. What a ridiculous idea. If the law on murder was failing to convict killers, you wouldn’t make murder legal. You would strengthen the law so that murderers were convicted. The same should happen with hunting legislation.
For a start, recklessness should be made a criminal offence. Time and again hunts cry “accident” when they have killed a fox, and that’s the end of the matter. Yet we know that they have often acted in such a manner that an “accident” was almost inevitable.
While it’s promising that Theresa May is no longer talking about a free vote to repeal the Hunting Act, the reality is that the only permanent solution to this sorry mess is to force hunts to disband. They’ve been given almost 13 years to prove that they can operate within the spirit of the law, and have repeatedly failed to comply. We need to dismantle them and rehome the hounds.
Until then, hunts across the country will continue to chase and kill wildlife. While that happens, hunt saboteurs will always be present to stop them.
• Lee Moon is spokesman for the Hunt Saboteurs Association
