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HUNTING
Contemporary Review, May, 2000 by Allan Ramsay
The English may have imbued hunting with notions of fairness and sportsmanship, but there is a pleasant irony, in these angst ridden times, in the fact that hunting was originally a foreign, specifically French import (if the Normans who introduced it in properly organised form to our islands can be regarded as French). They and their Plantagenet successors introduced game preserves and royal demesnes, codified the laws and imposed draconian punishments on those who transgressed, normally the wretched Anglo-Saxon. The object of all this solicitude was the fallow deer. But in a typically English inversion of the normally accepted order of things they gradually made a virtue out of necessity and promoted the fox in its place, using the fallow deer as ornament for their packs. Unlike the latter the fox was never classed as 'game' but always the vermin. The distinction is an important one, not least because it got rid of the connotations of exclusivity implicit in the former. Hunting may have become associated i n the public mind with privilege because landowners alone had the means and leisure to promote it. They may, like Squire Osbaldistone and his sons, have lived for nothing else. But no tradition is more closely bound up with hunting than that of hospitality, to great and small alike; and no sport is more frequently reminded of its obligations to the public. The only man to poach another's foxes was one whose own coverts were bare, never a poor man looking for his dinner. No-one ever heard of an affray between poachers and hunt servants, yet those between keepers and poachers were legion. The savage eighteenth-century penalties invoked against those found poaching game, including trout and salmon, speak for themselves about contemporary attitudes towards shooting and fishing. Where in hunting are there expressions so full of social innuendo as the pejorative distinctions between 'game' and 'coarse' fishing? To see the Dulverton West hounds trotting off, usually uphill, to draw the day's first covert, in all the ir diversity, human, equine and canine, is to watch egalitarianism in action, never more emphatically so as when against the background din of helicopters flying the very rich in from their overnight hotels for a day's shooting of hand-reared pheasants at Molland.
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It is, paradoxically, the inclusive character of hunting which presents any administration considering its future with the most delicate of the many problems it embraces. There are of course glamorous packs with a wealthy membership. They may be said to be 'exclusive' in the sense that a club is exclusive in attracting people of similar tastes and inclinations. But they are vastly outnumbered by packs of a more workaday character. They include those of the Fells and Welsh valleys, hunted on foot, and modest packs everywhere supported by ordinary people from a wide range of backgrounds. If hunting with dogs is made illegal they will go unless exceptions are made. But they can only be invidious. And they cannot fail to call into question the motives on which the opponents of hunting claim to rest their case. The issue of cruelty is already so contentious and fraught with emotion that further complications can only raise further doubts. No-one who hunts seriously contends that hunting is the only way of 'keepin g down' the number of fox, deer or whatever; or that it is devoid of suffering. But he would argue, as we all do, that such things are relative and that it contains fewer barbarities than other methods, and that none, like hunting, is in itself wholly effective. The honest attitude on this question of cruelty must surely be that of Lord Salisbury who, when asked for his opinion on something by a grandchild, is said to have replied 'I must wait until I am a tiger before I can answer that question.'
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