Today two tribes of traditional British sportsmen will be out in force for one of the first mass meetings of their season. From the South Devon to the Duke of Buccleuch's, and from the Essex and Suffolk to the Llandeilo Farmers', the countryside of Great Britain will once again come alive with the sweet music of the hounds, the bray of the hunting set, and the hullabaloo of the hunt saboteurs being dragged away by police or beaten up by hunt followers. The huntsmen chase the fox, and the antis chase the hunters: the sabs in pursuit of the nobs, and the demonstrators harassing the equitators.
Both sides in their opposed sports stand at the head of very long traditions. The custom of taking hounds on military campaign and writing about their care goes back beyond the Duke of Wellington to the dim past of Arrian, the biographer of Alexander the Great, and Xenophon. Hunting for pleasure is a primeval human instinct, started by the ancient Briton bringing home the bacon by biffing a behemoth, and extending down to the young bloods who galloped a straight line at Balaclava or drove one in the Gulf war. From that inveterate poacher, Falstaff, to Surtees, Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon and Evelyn Waugh, literature is full of hunting. In their devotion to it from William the Conqueror, who enclosed the New Forest for his sport, onwards, hunting has been a defining pastime of the monarchy.
On the other hand, opposition to hunting is not just a new pursuit of the envious or priggish urban and suburban masses. It represents an old English Puritan tradition of single-issue fanaticism and bossing other people about how to behave. Sam Johnson said that it was very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade anyone to call hunting one of them. And William Cowper exclaimed: "Detested sport, That owes its pleasures to another's pain." As Margot Asquith interrupted, when someone was praising her bete noire Lord Lonsdale's prowess as a rider to hounds: "Jump? Anyone can jump. Look at fleas."
More people are hunting and following hunts than ever before. The gulf between the country hunting tribe and the suburban protesting tribe is vast, and growing wider. Both sides really need to cultivate that other old English virtue of tolerance.
Earlier this year a video nasty, taken by a mole from the League Against Cruel Sports, showed cuddly little foxes being dug out and thrown to the hounds by the celebrated Quorn Hunt, and so (rightly) disgusted tender opinion. Kevin McNamara's Wild Mammals (Protection) Bill was defeated by only 12 votes earlier this year, with 27 Conservatives supporting it. Campaigns to ban hunting on National Trust land and around the county councils will not go away.
The saddle-leather conservatives of hunting must bend to the modern winds, and codify their sport so as to minimise cruelty. The protesters ought to accept that there is far more cruelty done to animals in stocking the deep freezers in supermarkets than in the highly inefficient but necessary culling of foxes by hunting.
Neutrals observing the two sports on the hunting field today, like many bouncing on it, will support that other honourable old English tradition of shouting for the underdog and wish the old fox a good run for his money. Run, Reynard, run.
