Posted on 02/19/2005 4:42:53 PM PST by aculeus
Put homosexuals marrying in the middle of it and the leftist might like it. How about hunting the protesters pets?
Get some coyotes, they love tasty foxes, and it will do wonders to reduce your stray cat population too.
The law states only use two dogs to flush out the fox. There are alternatives which the hunter can follow and continue to keep his hounds fully functional. Why can't he use drag hunting utilising a false scent trail. Why can't he use a legally shot fox carcass to lay a trail for the hunt? There is the alternative of sending the pack to countries who still allow use of pack hunting with dogs. For example South Africa.
Thank you for your articulate and comprehensive post on the joys of hunting. However, I do not share your particular view.
I am (was- now too old) an avid hunter and still am a gun collector. I have enjoyed hunting moose in Newfoundland, duck in the Kansas flyway, deer in Pennsylvania (rifle) and New Jersey (shot gun) among many other places. I am a contributor to and lifelong member of the NRA and no admirer of PETA. But my aversion to “the hunt” is based away, perhaps unfairly, from the time I flew for the 8th AF out of Brize Norton in England.
Here in America, as opposed to the British Isles, it is the common folk who mostly represent the hunters and gun owners. Anyone, repeat, anyone with a clean record can own firearms and enjoy hunting. There is absolutely no financial barrier such as the necessity of hunt club membership etc. Gun ownership and hunting is part of the fabric of American life for all Americans. It is a fundamental of our military tradition. It is fiercely defended.
My aversion to “the hunt” is a combination class attitude disdain (you wont find the butler on horseback) and the lack of the sportsmanship factor: a terrified animal as opposed to the wait and stalk inherent in most American game hunting where death is quick and unexpected.
Here is the scenario: The captured animal is in a cage, to be released when the horses and hounds are ready and the gentry are properly dressed and assembled. It is released to ultimately be torn to death or shot. I recommend the extensive scene which captures this in the wonderful movie, Tom Jones.
There would be no disagreement with hunting fox as varmits.
Tally Ho and have a nice day.
Just to try and clear up any remaining confusion about the gun issue here - the only gun you need to kill a fox is a shotgun or (occasionally) a .22 rifle. Both of these are legal in the UK, and virtually every farmer owns a shotgun. It's got nothing to do with money or class. There are no restrictions on using a shotgun to kill vermin on your own land. (And it's essential not only for foxes, but also rabbits, pigeons, crows, rats and other vermin). Many farmers already satisfactorily control their foxes by shooting, either because there are no nearby hunts (there are quite a few areas of rural Britain where there is little traditional hunting) or because, for a variety of reasons, they don't like having the hunts on their land.
Reference # 66
Reference #35
It is true that farmers in England may shotgun their own foxes. But farmers cannot stand guard over their flocks and poultry houses 24 hours a day, and it's impossible to work a farm all day long then wait up to catch the fox who comes at 3 a.m. Foxes are nocturnal animals and they do not hunt when visibility is good for humans to shoot in.
Besides, as you know, shotguns have a short range. If the fox is actually in your barnyard the shotgun is a fine weapon for it, but if the fox is eating your lambs alive in a field half a mile away in the middle of the night, the right to own a shotgun is not going to do you much good.
So in areas where for any reason there is no hunt club, farmers do trap, poison, and round up and shoot foxes. But as the Burn Commission Report showed, these fates cause more suffering for the foxes and are far less efficient than hunting them.
You say that part of your disdain for the support is based on class dislike. Be careful with this, because this is a foot in the door for liberal class envy and hatred. Would you end yachting, too, because you cannot afford it? It is no more fair to dislike an activity because it's pursued by the rich than it is to dislike an activity--say, basketball--because it's pursued by poor people. And while I don't know what things were like sixty years ago in the UK, as you do, I do know that today in both America and the UK foxhunting is done by people of many different social levels: the farm-worker, the suburban manicure girl, the ten-year-old child in Pony Club, and the prosperous lawyer, as well as the aristocrat. It represents a cross-section of British country people (excluding, of course, the welfare layabout and the Islamic terrorist). The hunt field is a great equalizer because the horse is just as likely to dump a rich physician as a barmaid.
Please don't base your views of foxhunting on a movie, particularly not a movie set in the eighteenth century and made about events that never took place. Movies aren't made by anybody who has ever been out in a hunt field and have little connection with reality.
It is absolutely untrue that foxes are put in cages and released for pursuit. There are far too many foxes in the UK for anyone to do that. Hounds are taken to a location where foxes are believed to be, the covert, and sent in to find scent. The fox is fast and much smarter than the the hounds so he has ample opportunity to escape. When and if he is killed, it's done with a snap of the neck: if you ever see a hound catch an animal he gives it a hard shake to break its neck. This is a better death than writhing in agony from poison or taking part of a shotgun blast, then taking days to die in the woods.
Nicely said.
The foregoing is your mis-quote. I do not "dislike" any class or what money can bring landowners or anyone else in GB. If it is true that people of modest means as described who do not own land can readily hunt in England it is news to me. Moreover, if caged animals are not released for the pleasure of the hunt I certainly stand corrected.
Have a great day.
I apologize for misunderstanding your words. Yes, it's true that people of very different financial positions can hunt, and it's certainly not just for landowners. Hey, if this were a sport for rich people I could never hunt myself since I'm just a divorced mom of limited means.
Where the confusion may have arisen about caging foxes is that in recent years, as the fox population has burgeoned out of control, foxes have moved into suburban and urban environments where they kill cats and small dogs. The suburbanites then hire people to come in and catch them. The trappers take them out into the country and dump them there, and they roam about, disoriented and not knowing where to find food or shelter, until they're hit by cars, poor creatures.
I abhor the animal rights group here in the US for they truly are not focused on animal welfare or nature but rather politics....perhaps the same is true in England.
Nonetheless, the Fox hunt seems a borderline case with respect to animal treatment. I lived in the hunt country of New Jersey and every year, within two miles of my home in Bedminster, the annual hunt was held. In that case a caged fox was released for the pleasure of the hounds and riders and was ultimately torn to pieces ( I am told as I never participated and now live in the mountains of North Carolina). During and after this event people from New York and the surrounding territory would come to enjoy the spectacle. Candellabras were set in front of the Rolls Royces, Packards and etc to mimick, I suppose, the English ride. My children unfortunately participated as spectators enjoying the day with friends.
While some animals may die as described in many posts herein, other people say death is not so pretty a sight. I looked at the BBC article yesterday on "Fox Hunting Inside and out" and have the impression that there are many informed people who do not share your view of either the degree of damage caused by the fox or the actual motivation for the hunt.
But I leave this entire subject for those people better informed and who are willing to consider both sides of the coin.
England for me was a time where the hunt was a different kind.
I went to college in NJ and hunted a little while I was there. Although mostly I rode with my college's equestrian team, I knew folks from most of the major hunts in central and North Jersey. I never was out with the Essex (Bedminster is in their country), but I would find it VERY hard to believe that they hunted a caged fox as you assert.
The MFHA (Master of Foxhounds Assn of N. America) strongly condemns this practice, and no hunt that releases a caged fox can be in good standing. The MFHA Code of Hunting Practices states that "foxes and coyotes must be hunted in their wild and natural state. Any other practice that does not give an animal a sporting chance is contrary to the best traditions of the sport and is strictly forbidden. All Hunts, in both the United States and Canada, who are members of the Association must follow this code or lose their membership."
I note that you "know" this "fact" only by hearsay . . . probably you heard it from somebody who was either ignorant or anti-hunting. (I would take anything you hear/read from the Beeb with a grain of salt, because they are both . . . the producers there are also not particularly honest, I would not be surprised if in pursuit of their anti-hunting agenda they lied as enthusiastically as Dan Rather and CBS . . . )
The class warfare thing, as others have noted, is completely a red herring invented by the anti-hunters and carried on by those who glean their ideas about foxhunting from movies loosely based on 18th century novels. Lots of "ordinary people" hunt both in the U.S. and in England. I'm just a suburban middle-class person who is a bit horse-crazy, by no stretch of the imagination am I wealthy. I have hunted all my life although I've never been a member of a hunt -- on borrowed horses, leased horses, horses that somebody wants to get some hunting experience . . . my kids have hunted on our trainer's ponies, borrowed ponies, even a pony that my trainer was trying to sell. . . . and while of course there are wealthy people out hunting on $50,000 horses, most of the field is composed of people of ordinary means who choose to spend their discretionary income on horses and hunting. Other people spend their discretionary income on Harleys or bass boats or Weatherby rifles.
I think you've fallen victim to anti-hunting propaganda.
Foxes love airports. Jets don't bother them and they are protected from hunters. They also serve a purpose there, they keep the rodent population down.
Works for me . . . so long as they aren't big enough to grease a plane off the runway if they try to cross at an inopportune time . . .
25 years ago I did allot of airport projects, thats when I first noticed them. Then as I traveled across the country I started to pay attention. Every airport that I have ever been to has them. Airports are sort of like fox heaven.
They never overpopulate, since they roam out to follow the food supply. They dig their dens as far away from moving things as possible, so the runways and taxiways are safe.
The unspeakable in full pursuit of the inedible, I think Oscart Wilde said.
Personally, I've never understood foxhunting. I don't really accept the point about pest removal. You don't see the man from Rentakill getting dressed up in Liberace's hand-me-downs, tootling a horn and then hot-footing into a cellar to chase a rat with 150 springer spaniels.
Whether it's cruel or not, doesn't really strike me as being relevant. It's just a preposturous waste of time, dressed up as tradition and re-enacted by some throughly nasty people. (There's a bit of class envy for you!
Having said that, there's an awful lot of things I'd want to ban before I got round to Toff-Sports. People talking on their mobile phones in a restaurant, for example, but don't get me started on that....
The hounds are the only ones who have the nose to scent the fox in covert and drive him out. That's why the sport developed as it did in the first place.
I wish you could come out with us on a wet day and see how "dressed up" we all look after galloping through muddy pastures and creek bottoms. My mare is steady but not the fastest thing around (you'd never guess she was of Bold Ruler and Dancer breeding, she can't catch cold) so I'm always at the back of the field and get plenty of mud all over me and the mare. Somebody had a camera, and somewhere there's a picture of my formerly black mare and me a uniform red-Georgia-clay color, except for our teeth and eyeballs . . .
I don't think Liberace's stuff would hold up very well. And while I guess there are some nasty folks in the field, there are a bunch of us fun-loving types too. You ought to come out and join us some time.
We LIKE mobile phones - useful for calling if you get lost (I have a GPS in my sandwich case, just in case).
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