This is becoming a recurring subject for me.
The Countryside Alliance has once again emerged from the hedgerow, red in tooth and press release, to announce that restricting hunting proves the government “doesn’t care about the countryside”. This is a familiar cry. It is also nonsense, polished to a high gloss and sold as heritage.
The trick relies on a sleight of hand so old it ought to be listed. Hunting is quietly substituted for “the countryside”, as if rural Britain consists mainly of people in pink coats galloping about after a fox on borrowed land. It does not. The countryside is farmers worrying about margins, villages losing their buses, young families priced out by second homes, and rural surgeries shutting early because they cannot recruit staff. None of these problems has ever been solved by blowing a horn and releasing hounds.
Hunting is not rural life. It is a hobby, and a very particular one, practised by a tiny and socially unrepresentative minority. Most rural people have never hunted, never wanted to, and do not see it as the beating heart of their community. To suggest otherwise is like claiming snooker is the backbone of Sheffield because a few people once wore waistcoats there.
The economic argument fares no better. We are solemnly told that banning hunting devastates rural jobs, usually by people who have never tried to count them. The numbers involved are microscopic compared with agriculture, construction, tourism or even garden centres. Horses still exist. Land still exists. Rural leisure did not collapse into a sinkhole when foxes stopped being chased for sport. Many hunts simply rebranded as drag hunts and carried on with the bits that did not involve tearing an animal apart.
Then there is pest control, wheeled out like a favourite antique. Fox control happens every night across rural Britain, with lamps, rifles and people who actually want the fox dead quickly rather than theatrically. Hunting with hounds was never an efficient management tool. It was pageantry with a corpse at the end, and everyone involved has known this for decades.
What the Countryside Alliance is really defending is not the countryside but a story about it. A story in which tradition equals virtue, opposition equals metropolitan sneering, and any ethical objection is dismissed as ignorance of “how things are done”. It is culture war politics, not land management. Hunting became a convenient symbol because it allowed a small group to wrap a private pastime in the Union Flag and dare anyone to unwrap it.
The irony is that this performance has actively harmed rural politics. While energy is spent pretending that fox hunting is the litmus test of rural authenticity, the serious issues are neglected. Farm incomes remain squeezed by supermarkets. Post-Brexit labour shortages go unresolved. Planning rules please nobody. Broadband crawls. Buses vanish. Vets are thin on the ground. None of these problems has ever been top of the Countryside Alliance’s marching order, which tells you something.
Public opinion, including rural opinion, has been consistently against hunting with hounds. This is not townies lecturing yokels. It is a broad judgement that cruelty for entertainment is not a compelling tradition, however old the waistcoat. Rural people are perfectly capable of holding that view without surrendering their identity to Islington.
So when the Countryside Alliance claims that limiting hunting proves contempt for the countryside, what they really mean is contempt for them. The two are not the same. The countryside is vast, diverse, working and often struggling. Hunting is a hobby. Confusing the two is not an argument. It is camouflage.
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