Foxhunting

Foxhunting then. This Wednesday, without public input and flying in the face of previous opinion polls (some 80%, allegedly), the Conservative party will attempt to put through an amendment to the foxhunting laws, currently a tenuously worded draft order stating that dogs can legally be used to flush or stalk a fox into the open, where it can be shot.

Two things. Firstly, the draft order falls under the aegis of the Small Business, Enterprise, and Employment Act. One of the key props used by proponents of foxhunting is that it represents a valid source of fiscal income - that monetizing the killing of an animal also confers legal legitimacy. This dovetails neatly with the feeling, long upheld by campaigners, that foxhunting, as well as being a business concern and enjoyable social activity, is part of a deeper cultural touchstone, a deeply personal act that is etched in the English rural psyche, intimately interwoven with the changing of the seasons and the proliferation of nature. For many hunt campaigners, there is the sense that a denial of the right to hunt equates to a perversion of the law of nature as well as the law of the land, something urbanites implicitly don't 'get'.

This is, to put it mildly, so much horseshit. I grew up in the Kent Weald (and later, Sussex), a supernaturally (in both the real and figurative sense) pretty landscape of bridleways fringed with oak and birch, interspersed with non-native chestnuts left there by the Romans. There are shallow streams originally used to irrigate water meadows by the Iron age Cantiaci people, and bright, airy patches of crop and downland, wandering hop farms, and polytunnels for growing fruit, each little plot of land bisected by hedges of dog rose and bramble, converted from arable to pasture use under the Enclosure act. Prior to that under the Tudors, the landscape was Royal parkland, and before that, untouched old growth forest (the word Weald derives from the Germanic Wald, meaning woodland) dotted with grassy balds and heathland. It is a deeply human, recessional landscape, a landscape built on the memory of successive generations of land use, doctored, cultivated, and modified by Paleolithic, Neolithic, Roman, Jute, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval, and Tudor people.

To suggest that the act of foxhunting is part of both a deep connection to nature and a link to the pulse of our ancestors in some long and unbroken societal chain is nothing more than the cynical manipulation of an idealised Merrie England that never existed. But more than this, that the countryside we all enjoy should be hijacked, misappropriated, and codified according to the narrow definition of a small, entitled, arrogant section of society - a set that you can join by buying property in the right place, thinking the right thoughts, buying a pair of eighty quid Hunter Wellingtons, and ideally participating in dressage - makes me very nearly as angry as the act of hunting a fox for fun does.

Secondly, the proposed amendment makes repeated reference to two nebulous concepts: research purposes and wildlife management, specifically "the use of dogs below ground to protect livestock, or birds for shooting”. There is one obvious comparison when referring to research practices, and that is Japan's research whaling program (the pleasantly harmless preferred term is 'scientific research provision').

Just so we can see what we're getting into bed with, here's a brief overview of the moral rigour that Japan practices with its research whaling program. According to the IWC, all animals euthanised (in Japan's instance, via grenade-tipped harpoon) for research must be used, i.e, sold or given away - a convenient caveat for a nation that wants to sell whale meat in the first place. The approval of a scientific whaling permit is granted by the nation that applied for it - in other words, Japan can approve its own permits without external scrutiny or legal interference. Finally, the IWC has defined research to mean any project with a set goal and viable means of gathering data. Japan's research project is primarily concerned with establishing if whale populations have now recovered to the point where they can be hunted for consumption again. They do this by culling whales in large numbers, then seeing how the population recovers.