Bloodsports

The Badminton (Beaufort) crowd were out again yesterday, all pageantry and plumes, while a fox flung itself into traffic in raw panic. My wife saw the reality – not countryside tradition, not noble sport, just a terrified animal running for its life because a pack of hounds was somewhere behind it. You could practically smell the fear on the air.

And we’re expected to swallow the usual claptrap about trail hunting and heritage. They love that word, heritage. It hides a multitude of sins. But heritage is precisely the point, just not in the way they intend. Fox hunting didn’t spring from farmers fretting about hens. It was never pest control. That justification is a late Victorian retrofit, invented when the urban public began to see the spectacle for what it was. The real roots lie in the cavalry. Hunting was off season military drill for the officer class. Ride fast across unpredictable ground. Keep formation. Follow the horn. Jump the hedge. Break your neck if you must, but do it stylishly with a flask of port in your pocket. The fox was chosen not because it was the scourge of the henhouse, but because it ran long and provided a decent chase. Stag hunting came first. Foxes filled the training gap.

Which is why the modern protestations about “pest control” are so absurd. If pest control were the point, they wouldn’t have spent centuries breeding foxes, maintaining coverts, and shaping the landscape to ensure a healthy supply. It is a sport masquerading as necessity, and the mask slips every time a frightened fox ends up on a main road while the field trots along behind.

So the obvious answer remains the simplest. If they want to ride, they must have independent oversight. A council appointed observer with a body cam, paid for by the hunt, tracking exactly what the hounds do. No observer, no riding. If they are as law abiding as they claim, they should welcome it. Police body cams exist for the same reason. Transparency protects the innocent and exposes the guilty.

Cue the outrage. It will destroy rural jobs. Stables will close. Kennels will shut. The countryside will fall into ruin without a gentleman in pink galloping across it. But livelihood is not a moral shield. Livelihoods were lost on the abolition of slavery. Entire industries built on exploitation vanished because they deserved to. The fact that someone profits from something does not grant it divine right to continue.

The truth is simpler. The hunt’s economic halo is flimsy. Most of the jobs they boast about would exist with or without the hounds. Farming does not collapse because a fox isn’t torn apart. Villages don’t wither because a whipper in hangs up his horn. And if any rural economy genuinely depends on driving wildlife into traffic, then the problem is far deeper than any ban could cause.

Independent oversight wouldn’t destroy hunting; it would expose it. And that is precisely why hunts fear it. Strip away the myths, and what remains is not tradition, not pest control, not some noble defence of livestock. It is cavalry practice that survived into the twenty first century by pretending to be something else. And the fox running under a car is the clearest proof of all that the disguise no longer works.