HUNTING

Allan Ramsay

Happy the young man who can, for a time, entrust his education in life to an experienced member of the opposite sex. I am fortunate enough to have had two such mentors, both ladies past their prime whose charms were of the maturer kind. One was Najma, meaning 'Star', a three-quarter bred Arab with everything of the thoroughbred about her in looks and comportment. The other quarter I fancy owed itself to a drop of Waler blood in her genealogy, from one of the thousands of Australian horses shipped to the Middle East in 1914 as Cavalry remounts. But before her came Poppy. Despite her plebeian name she shared with Najma the three essential attributes for a good mount: intelligence, good manners and a bottom like a barmaid. She had been a hunt horse before she came my way and looking over the tops of her ears as she gazed intently at the hounds feathering away across the patch of ground in front of us I truly believed, with Snaffles, that it was 'the finest view in the world' only it was not across the smooth pa stures, neat copses and well made fences of the Shires, but onto acres of tussocky, dun coloured grass pockmarked with the vivid green of shallow bog and fringed by brown moorland. Not that it mattered: on Poppy one was on a level with the best, and a young man's insecurity and diffidence seemed to fade away. Reflecting on today's controversy about hunting I find myself wondering whether it is not perhaps that simple transformation which others so resent: 'A nation of gallant men [ldots] and of cavaliers' said Edmund Burke. Would that we were.

It is difficult to write objectively and dispassionately of something about which one feels strongly, for or against. 'Tell me a man's a foxhunter and I loves him at once' said Mr Jorrocks. Today he is more likely to be an object of censure, Mr Jorrocks too. The future of hunting hangs in the balance, a prospect unthinkable to Will Ogilvie who wrote in the twenties:

This is our heritage that none can take

The gift we hold, the gift we give again;

And this the spirit that no time can break

So long as England and her fields remain

But it is true, for all his confidence, and the arguments on both sides continue to be articulated with growing passion. There have been protest marches, notably that organised by the Countryside Alliance in London on 1 March 1998, and counter demonstrations. Hunts have been targeted by animal rights activists and there have been violent clashes between them and hunt supporters. The more prominent have been the recipients of hate mail of a kind normally reserved for child molesters. There have been innumerable letters and articles in the press and extensive media coverage, generally ill informed. The government, the Prime Minister included, have contributed to the furore by seeming to favour a ban and then equivocating, declining, despite impressions to the contrary, to make time for the Foster bill then reverting to earlier undertakings in favour of legislation in (apparently unscripted) remarks in a press interview given by the Prime Minister. He later appeared to include hunting among those 'forces of con servatism' criticised in his speech at the Labour Party conference in Brighton. Under pressure the government finally decided to remit the issue to a commission chaired by Lord Bums, the former Permanent Secretary at the Treasury. This is a wise decision: since the committee's terms of reference are wide the issue is likely to be examined in all its aspects, economic and social, as well as others. But whatever the outcome of the committee's deliberations and any subsequent government decision, hunting has a long history and is representative, in many people's eyes, of quite another, less creditable, Britain.

Given the tenor of my opening remarks it is necessary to declare my hand before going any further. I have hunted, though not regularly nor very often, certainly not so often or so regularly as to consider myself a hunting man, yet always with enjoyment and appreciation of what the sport has to offer (and it is a sport in the way that bear and bull baiting -- with which its critics occasionally bracket it -- were not). I have hunted stag, fox, otter and hare and ridden to hounds abroad, including with scratch packs organised by English (or Irish) in exile. Since a little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing I do not propose to offer any comparison between hunting in England and hunting abroad except to say that they are different. The latter have their own traditions and ceremonies; we have ours. But I have yet to meet a foreigner who does not regard hunting in England as something in a class of its own, just as we do. It is always pleasant to have one's prejudices confirmed, especially when it is done i n a generous spirit. But whatever it is that difference has an extraordinary capacity for leaving some indefinable sense of itself behind it, long after hunting has disappeared from a place where the English may have hunted. Perhaps one has to have hunted to be aware of it, but it is there still in the Peshawar Vale country in Pakistan, in Ootacamund in India, in parts of the Almoraima, in the Gibraltar hinterland where the Calpe Hunt used to flourish. In more recent times the horn has echoed through the olive groves of Granada. The essence of the spirit in which the English approached their hunting was that the quarry -- even the noisy jackal -- had to be given a sporting chance. Over centuries of practice a whole elaborate system of rules and customs evolved to ensure this, not primarily for the sake of the quarry itself but with the aim of providing a good day's sport. It required of course a close acquaintance with the quarry and its habits, even to a certain affinity for it, amounting to affection. Our l iterature is full of the celebration of the stag, fox and hare, of the mystique and mythology of hunting. Nothing could be further removed from the ritual formalities of the continent, or the grimly murderous processes of trapping, gassing, poisoning or shooting.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

It is, perhaps, precisely because hunting is incapable of neat classification that it seems right to some that an attempt should be made to tidy it away through legislation or by some other means, along with the city vagrants and school dunces or 'under-performers'. 'Hunting belongs to the history books' said the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary Anne Widdecombe magisterially 'and there it should remain'. How generations of Widdecombes must be turning in their Dartmoor graves, simple men whom hunting with one of the unpretentious local packs must have given so much pleasure, at finding one of their own speaking thus. Among the 250,000 or so who marched, or more precisely ambled good humouredly, along the prescribed route in the warm spring sunshine in London on 1 March last year, among the Barbours and the cloth caps and snappy brim Trilbys, amid the fanatics wielding hunting horns and past the gentle applaudissements of onlookers on the steps of Brook's and Boodles, not owning to an affiliation to any hunt nor allegiance to anyone except himself, was a small man from Lancashire pushing a home-made wooden trolley carrying a defiant message and escorted by two Staffordshire bull terriers. The whole assemblage was politically incorrect to a degree, most of all perhaps the dogs. He epitomised for me the inveterate and priceless bloodymindedness of the English, their objection to being pushed around and placed in pigeon holes, and those who were perceptive enough could feel that underneath the friendly tolerance something essentially serious was at work and that the picnic atmosphere concealed a deep resolve, and that even if, against the odds, everyone else were to capitulate tomorrow, there would still be the problem of Albert Elkins to deal with.

For there is, undeniably, a magic about hunting and not all the loutish behaviour, the bad manners and lack of consideration occasionally displayed by those who hunt can do more than lightly tarnish its surface. It may say nothing to that part of the population which has arrived on these shores since the end of the Second World War and its hold on the public imagination may be declining; but it says enough still to a sufficient number to be regarded as part of our living heritage. It has at least as much emotional appeal, for its supporters, as football to its fans. It has its own mythology. In a well known incident of the First World War an officer of the East Surreys led his men across a piece of ground in Flanders by kicking a football in front of them. Colonel Campbell of the Coldstream Guards rallied his and earned a VC in the process with the aid of a silver hunting horn presented by the men of the First Battalion. 'And now, Gentlemen, I wish you good hunting' said General Montgomery to his officers on the eve of Alamein. And he concluded his address to all ranks on the eve of Overlord in 1944 with the words 'Good luck each one of you. And good hunting on the mainland of Europe'. Just so much history? Or did Montgomery, that supreme professional with an instinct for the popular touch, choose words that would strike the right emotional chord, with just that right degree of [acute{e}]lan? One can make what one likes of such examples. Jeremy Paxman in his book The English describes the East Surreys' officer as' [ldots] quite clearly mad'. But then so was Wolfe, George III was asked to believe. But I wonder what it is that makes us, normally a tolerant and good humoured people, so censorious; and why the drip, drip, drip of denigration is so persistent today? Or is it only a minority, unrepresentative of any wider feeling, least of all those which lie buried deep inside us, who feel that they have the right to pronounce so dismissively on the instinctive recourse of men and women in times of difficulty and dan ger to things that are familiar?

As I understand it the case against hunting rests, the issue of cruelty apart, on its incompatibility with the values of an increasingly urban and multicultural public ethos. That there is a degree of subjectivity in such an opinion is undeniable and to allow legislation to be enacted on any such basis, even part, would be extremely dangerous because of the precedent it would set and because of its implications for personal liberty. Leaving aside the debatable claim that a child may be traumatised by being blooded, hunting harms no-one. Its nuisance value and threat to public order and security are a good deal less than those associated with football and are caused primarily by the activities of a minority opposed to hunting. On the other hand, though liberty rather than economics is the key issue, the defenders of hunting are undeniably right in claiming that the effect on local communities of a ban on hunting would be harmful, perhaps disproportionately so in those areas where the current agricultural depr ession is already most severely felt i.e. in the fringe areas of poorer farms and 'unsmart' hunts. Much else of value will be affected, not just the multiplicity of trades and crafts that depend upon hunting for at least part of their livelihood, but a whole nexus of interrelated activities which provide employment and enjoyment, not just for the countryman: the Pony Club, Point to Points, Hunter trials, horse breeding and showing and more besides.

Above all I would regret the disappearance of the Hunt staff. Hunting with hounds demands great skill and the key to keeping your clientele as a hunt is to provide good sport. There is of course satisfaction over a kill at the end of a good run, and while this is the purpose of hunting there is, for those who take the trouble to study these things, an almost deeper satisfaction to be gained by watching a huntsman at work with his hounds on a difficult day when the prospects of a kill, or even a run, seem negligible. The best of them have a very real understanding of the animal they are hunting. One I remember, as a boy, going back after we had put the hounds in the van at the end of a bitter January day with snow threatening, to where failing light and scent had compelled us to call it a day. It had been a good run and we had hunted the same hare all afternoon. We searched, furrow by furrow with the aid of a torch, the plough where we had left her and eventually found her, lying soaked with sweat and so stif f she could barely move. 'We must tickle her up a bit' he said and picking her up, put her on her legs and kept her going as she hobbled along, pushing her on when she showed signs of stopping. Eventually she loped away, her ears up, her circulation restored. Had he left her, sweat-soaked as she was, she would have stiffened up and the cold would have killed her. That is one example. But I have also known a huntsman call off hounds that seemed certain to kill, and raise his hat in tribute to the stag that had given us a run to remember. 'In that word hunting what a ramification of knowledge is compressed.' But that is not all: it is unfailing courtesy, especially towards the very old and the very young, that makes association with such men such a privilege.

Nor can one simply write off the pageantry. Substitute instead, a group of men, dressed in camouflage jackets and armed with shotguns, accompanied by terriers, setting out on a Saturday morning to shoot foxes. Which is likely to disturb Mrs Smith, in the country for a quiet weekend of walking, the more? Perhaps, to make her discomfiture complete one should whisper in her ear that the time to kill foxes is when the vixen is carrying cubs, or by stopping the earth and gassing them new born, when the primroses are out. Close season? Come, come Mrs Smith: this is business. We have our contract quota to fulfil: the fox observes none where your Christmas turkey is concerned. And with the pageantry will go much literature and verse and song, not much of it good perhaps, but how much is anything that is -- or was once -- popular, good in the lit:crit sense? Only cricket can be said to rival hunting in terms of its contribution to our literature.

On 11 November 1919, the first Armistice after the Great War, the Devon and Somerset Staghounds met as usual. Before leaving to draw the first covert of the day, at 11 o'clock, they observed the two minutes silence, in common with the rest of the country. The hounds were gathered up and the field turned to face eastwards, towards France and Flanders and beyond, towards Gallipoli and Mesopotamia where so many of their members had died. Hounds, keen to get off, are normally restless on such moments, the young ones always trotting off to inspect a child or investigate something; the more experienced ones sitting around fidgeting and keyed up. But everyone noticed how, on this occasion, they stood quite still, even the youngest, their sterns gently waving in the bright morning air, looking towards the same distant battlefields. For Mr Everard, the historian of the hunt, it was all too much to bear and he turned for home. 'There are too many ghosts' he said. It will take more than legislation to exorcise them.

Sir Allan Ramsay is a former British Ambassador to Morocco.

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