The shires of England are again echoing to the sound of the chase after the opening this week of the fox-hunting season. In spite of decades of campaigning by anti-blood sports groups, sporadic violence by hunt saboteurs and the loss of hunting country to farming, urban sprawl and road building, the sport seems to be flourishing as never before.
There are 194 packs of foxhounds in England and Wales - more than in the Edwardian heyday of country life - and they take part in some 21,400 days of hunting every season, according to the Masters of Foxhounds Association. There are 48,000 hunt members and a further 400,000 people who regularly follow the hunt by car, on foot or on bicycle. "We reckon that over a whole season, up to a million people may be involved at one time or another if you include spectators and the thousands who turn out to watch such traditional events as the Boxing Day meet of the Quorn in Loughborough market place in Leicestershire," Brian Toon, for the association, says.
Jane Ridley, historian daughter of the former cabinet minister, Nicholas Ridley, attributes the growing numbers taking part in hunting to the move into the country of people with town-based incomes. "Subscription to one of the top hunts can run to รบ1,000 a year, not to speak of the cost of keeping horses," she said. "Yet most leading hunts now have long waiting lists." Ms Ridley, who has just written a history of foxhunting and rides to hounds with the Jedforest, a Border pack, thinks risk-taking is an important part of the attraction. "Dressing up in quaint early Victorian costume is like putting on a uniform. It makes you feel braver. I have done things when hunting that I would never dream of doing in cold blood."
Yet as more people take part in foxhunting the pressure to get it banned is also growing. The start of this year's season coincides with the second attempt in two years to persuade members of the National Trust, who now number two million, to vote in favour of resolutions calling for bans on the hunting of foxes, hares, mink and deer on the 600,000 acres the trust owns.
The outcome of the mainly postal ballot will be announced at the trust's annual general meeting at Llandudno on Saturday. Few foxhunts are wholly dependent on the use of trust land, and the legal terms on which some properties were donated to the trust stipulate that hunting should continue. So the impact of a vote in favour of a ban might well be more psychological than practical.
Conservative policy has been to treat participation in foxhunting as a matter for individual choice. There are, however, prominent opponents of hunting on the Tory benches. Dame Janet Fookes, MP for Plymouth Drake, who will be among those trust members voting for a ban, believes that the hunting of any animal with hounds should be prohibited. "The argument that hunting is part of the traditional way of life in the countryside and must be preserved does not wash. So were bear-baiting, cockfighting and many other extremely unpleasant rural pursuits."
Last month, the Labour party, in its new document on environmental policy, declared the "organised hunting of foxes, deer, hares and other mammals for pleasure in ways which are sure to inflict pain and suffering" to be "unacceptable to the majority of people in Britain". A future Labour government would hold a free vote on the principle of a ban.
John Blakeway, senior joint-master of the Belvoir, which hunts in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, says loss of hunting country to farming has been more of a problem than the activities of saboteurs and the anti-blood sports lobby. "I have been hunting for 50 years. Increased cereal growing since the second world war has reduced the length of the hunting season by about a month."
Hunt enthusiasts argue that the fox is a pest to farmers and needs to be controlled, and that other methods, such as shooting, snaring and gassing, are more cruel than hunting. That argument is disputed by James Barrington, director of the League Against Cruel Sports. "Leaving aside the moral argument and the question of cruelty, hunting is a very ineffective form of control," he said. "Perhaps 10,000 to 12,000 foxes are killed in hunts each season. Yet as many as 70,000 are killed on the roads. We also question claims by sheep farmers that without control foxes would increase in number and prey more heavily on lambs.
"In Scotland, where the government subsidises fox destruction clubs, Aberdeen University found that an estate which suspended fox control for three years suffered no increase in fox numbers."
