Of course foxhunting should not be banned. As a human activity it is as cruel as jogging and almost as boneheadedly incomprehensible as skiing. So, fine by me, ban them all. But, on the whole, best to ban none.
At this point the usual course for the hunting defence lobby John Mortimer, Michael Heseltine, etc is to canter suavely through a series of second-rank literary masters Trollope, Surtees leap a few environmental hedgerows and dismount in a thicket of elegant tropes on the barbarity and sub-literate Political Correctness of the hunt saboteurs. Case proven, slap on the back, glass of port, old man?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the, as it were, fence, the antis muster their disparate forces. Urban clergymen, crazed animal rights activists, anguished, faltering liberal academics, the RSPCA, Kevin McNamara, MP, and the 175 anti-hunting MPs (last Friday's Commons debate voted in favour of preserving hunting by a majority of just 12) jeer at Trollope, sneer at the hunters' environmentalism and ponder nervously the nature of man's stewardship of creation. We are the Right, the Good. We care. Case proven. Cup of camomile tea, comrade?
It is an English comedy - the insufferable in pursuit of the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. There is even the Church of England to provide local colour. Archbishop Runcie went so far as to condemn intensive factory farming and, ever since, animal rights clergymen have been trying to railroad the synod into damning foxhunting. So far no luck: pale, progressive divines have found themselves deadlocked with the ruddy-cheeked, rural types. On this daft, seemingly trivial issue of foxhunting, English public life has become a laughable, cartoon confrontation of stereotypes.
But what is the issue? It is certainly not rational. From the comfort of one's Corbusier lounger in the suburbs there is, for example, no way of disentangling the two sides of the environmental impact argument. Foxes have to be killed, say the hunters, they are pests. No they don't, says Dr Stephen Harris of Bristol University; culling, even up to 70 per cent of their population, makes no difference to numbers, and livestock losses to foxes are minimal.
Hunters say they protect the environment by preserving coverts, woodland, hedgerow and so on. Fine, say the antis, but why can't we just decide to protect the environment without this bloody ritual? And so on, and so on.
But, as with all such arguments, the terms are irrelevant. There is no way any amount of reasoning can win converts; this is a battle to the death. And, as such, all that really matters is the underlying state of mind on both sides. What force is driving all these fine-sounding rationalisations?
At the dark and serious heart of this comedy lies our attitude to animals. Violent, cruel and bigoted as are many animal rights activists, it is first necessary to understand the respectable intellectual underpinning of their case. This comes from Tom Regan, an American philosopher whose book, "The Case for Animal Rights", is the movement's primary text.
Regan argues that, since our pet dog is evidently the same dog in the morning as in the evening, it has "a unified psychological presence". It has a biography as well as a biology and this provides the basis for an extension to dogs of some of the rights we extend to ourselves. This need not extend to slugs and amoeba and, in fact, it is not even clear how far it should extend. But mere uncertainty about where to draw the line is no argument against the basic case.
Regan's essential point is that we can no longer say that animals are fundamentally different from us. Darwin proved otherwise. To be fully human, therefore, we must learn to extend the best of our humanity to the rest of creation.
Andrew Linzey, an Anglican theologian at Essex University, adds to this point our progressive discovery of how unnecessary it is to exploit animals. Once we thought we had to eat meat to survive, but now we know we do not, so we can make the higher moral decisions not to kill animals and eat them. Similarly, we once thought it was necessary to kill foxes to protect our agriculture. Now we know it is not, so we can decide to abstain.
For Linzey, the libertarian argument does not apply. The law exists to protect the weak and there is every reason to insist that that protection should be extended to animals. It is, he says, a gospel issue. How can we hunt foxes for fun if we believe in a benign God, the creator of all things?
The key to all these arguments is their progressive vision. We are moving forward into a finer, greater awareness of our humanity and must abandon the trappings of our barbaric past, such as foxhunting, just as we have abandoned bear-baiting and public executions.
Against this the foxhunting lobby is anti-progressive. It insists the balance of the countryside evolved over centuries. Animals are chattels or pests. They are ours to be mercifully managed, left in peace or destroyed. It is for their benefit as well as ours. Only by such means can civilised man live in true harmony with nature.
The point about the animal rights argument, as Marion Shoard, of Reading University, has pointed out, is: where do you stop? Clearly, for consistency's sake, anybody who is opposed to killing foxes for pleasure must be against eating meat for pleasure. And, as this is an intrinsically progressive view, the line will steadily be pushed out until we cannot kill slugs merely to sustain the pleasure of our gardens.
Linzey avoids this problem by talking about degrees of sentence. Foxes are different from fishes, for example, because of their greater sense of self and general awareness. Like Regan, he is prepared to draw a line beyond which rights cannot seriously be extended. But the central point is that both insist the line is drawn beyond the merely human realm. And this is the place, far beyond the rhetoric of the coverts and the culling, where we have to make up our minds. Are animals utterly different from us or are they sufficiently similar to partake of the privileges and rights we accord ourselves? A Christian can go either way: like Linzey, he can speak of the divine unity of all creation or he can insist on the traditional conception of the uniquely human attribute of an immortal soul, which places him far above the animal kingdom.
My answer is, I am afraid, ruthlessly anthropocentric. The one most glaring fact about humans is their difference from anything else in the universe, animals included. Linzey is wrong, indeed incoherent, when he speaks of self-consciousness in animals, and Regan is performing a sleight of hand when he speaks of unified psychological presences. I have a similarly qualified avocado plant. These concepts could not exist in the world if we were not here; the dinosaurs knew nothing of such things.
Rights are complicated. It is a serious philosophical problem whether even human beings have any. And to suggest that these spectral entities can be extended to other species is madness. Certainly we should treat animals with appropriate mercy and affection, but to make them neo-Marxist subjects of history is bizarre.
This argument goes further. Unlike Linzey and Regan, I think the line is clear; there are humans and there are other things. Cheap expediency often leads to blurring of this point. Baroness Warnock and her committee, for example, allowed experiments on human embryos up to 14 days. Why? Because we might benefit medically. The scientists seem like nice people, so Warnock whimpers and submits. But the line is absolute or it is nothing; an embryo is human and human beings are not a means to an end, they are ends in themselves. So, at one end of the spectrum, earnest, tousle-haired liberals are eroding the boundaries and value of human life and, at the other, the animal rights lobbyists are denying human ascendancy to the extent of attacking their fellow humans. From both ends we are made to feel that the fact of being human is reduced, belittled.
Foxhunting is a stupid, unlovely sport. It has none of the poetry or power of, for example, bullfighting. The asymmetry of all those horses, hounds and humans charging about after a single, small fox is grotesque when set against the balance of power between a man and a bull. But it is a human ritual with a certain meaning and, perhaps, a certain rationale. And I suspect the hunters are right when they say it does more good than harm.
The life and death of a fox is a very small thing in such a context. Above all, it is not a human thing.
