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HUNTING
Contemporary Review, May, 2000 by Allan Ramsay
Coming back to it after an absence of thirty years, though no longer hunting, ones immediate impression is of the degree to which it has changed. I do not suppose that at any time in its long history has it had to adapt to the pressure of events as in the period from 1960 to the present. It has had to confront largely hostile media interest, and active, sometimes violent, opposition. At the same time it has become more popular. Fields are bigger, more heterogeneous and noisier and car followers legion. Some of these are genuine supporters, some not. All of them present increasingly pressing problems of control and presentation since this is the 'public interface' first encountered by the anxious uncommitted passer-by hurrying to an appointment. And since many more of them now drive 4x4's and relish the opportunity hunting gives them to put theory into practice, they can do a great deal of damage. To the sensitive and solitary walker the passage of a hunt must seem at times as if the hordes of Genghis Khan ha d just swept by in armoured cars. Ernie Bawden, perhaps the greatest of all in the long list of fine Huntsmen of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, foresaw the situation even before the Second World War; 'We'll have a problem with they, one of these days' he is reported to have said on seeing twenty cars arriving at one meet. One wonders what he would think today when the space and silence the huntsman needs in which to exercise his skills are at a premium. Changes in the physical landscape have imposed their own constraints; agri-business, creeping urbanisation, the motorways and their tributaries, all the consequences of growing population and traffic density, especially in the south. Some hunts are essentially suburban in that their country is ring fenced by new conurbations, industrial estates, public parks and leisure facilities, a phenomenon reflected in their membership. They appear to thrive nonetheless. No animal species has proved itself better able to adapt to the changing landscape of Britain than the fox; it is, pre-eminently, a scavenger, very much at home among the domestic refuse.
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Hunting adapts because it has to. It cannot afford not to make concessions, nor to risk prejudicing goodwill 'Hunting' wrote Lord Willoughby de Broke, himself a Master of Foxhounds 'like the drama or any other institution, depends for its existence on the support of public opinion [ldots] it is either national or it is nothing.' As every reader of Surtees knows, the hunting field encompasses humanity in all its vagaries, from the most refined to the utterly epicene. Never was a belief more mistaken than that it is, somehow, elitist. Public opinion in Lord Willoughby de Broke's time may not have been quite what it is today and the nation in many respects different, but what he wrote in 1926 remains valid and no follower of hounds would wish to dispute it. The most acceptable way of determining the future of hunting is to leave it to itself. Like the purveyor of any other commodity it will either adjust to market forces and produce the goods that people want, or it will die a natural death.
