Britain after the Hunting Ban, March 2005
A stag flanked by two female red deer, or “hinds,” trotted down a steep moorland pasture toward a wood. Two mounted hunters were behind them, and staghounds were in between. The deer’s trot was faster than the hunters’ canter and as fast as the all-out run of the hounds. A horn was blown. We were off—over a soaked, slippery sheep meadow, between the stone posts of a narrow gate, down a muddy track perilous with ruts, into a country lane of barely an arm’s breadth, through the tiny streets of an old village with tourists hopping out of our way, then making a hairpin turn onto a paved road, speeding uphill around blind curves, and narrowly avoiding several head-on collisions with trucks. It was a thrilling ride, even if it was in a Suzuki SUV driven by a retired grocer, an enthusiast of stag hunting who had volunteered to show me the hunt on Exmoor in England’s West Country.
We arrived at a hilltop opposite the steep pasture and above the woods. From here I could look across a valley at . . . not much. On the crest of the far slope several dozen members of the hunt were sitting on their horses. They watched two dogs sniffing the underbrush below. Two men in scarlet coats were with the dogs, more closely watching them sniff.
The idea of a stag hunt evokes chivalry—knights in jerkins and hose, ladies on sidesaddles with wimples and billowing dresses, a white stag symbolizing something or other, and Robin Hood getting in the way. An actual stag hunt is more like a horseback meeting of a county planning commission. The equestrian committee is responding to deer-population-growth issues and deer-herd rural sprawl. Red deer are noble animals—big, anyway. They are half again the size of American whitetails. In the fall a mature stag has antlers that could hang the hats of a small town in Texas. But red deer are also pests. England is intensely cultivated. A farmer may find 100 red deer in his pasture, each eating as much grass as three sheep. The deer’s zoning permits are revoked by a process too deeply imbued with tradition to be called bureaucratic, but which is a reminder that one of civilization’s oldest traditions is bureaucracy. Stag hunts cull the weaker hinds from November through February, the less promising young stags in hunts such as this one in March, and the stags whose days of promise are behind them during late summer and fall.
Each hunt has a “harbourer,” a specialist whose job is to watch the herds and select a specific stag. Only this one is to be hunted. (When hunting hinds, which are effectively indistinguishable, the selection is made by the hounds on Darwinian principles. Thus there is an intellectual connection between the British ban on hunting with dogs and the American call for teaching creationism in schools.)
A chivalrous aspect to stag hunting, remains, however. The three hunts in the Exmoor region maintain, with noblesse oblige, a twenty-four-hour emergency service for sick or injured deer. Mostly these are deer that have been hit by cars and have crawled off into the bushes—as many as 100 of them a year. Members of the hunts will come out in the middle of the night with horses and dogs, to track these suffering creatures. In some years the hunters do as much euthanizing as they do hunting.
For a proper hunt, or “meet,” in which Rovers and BMWs do not initiate the pursuit, the harbourer spends the previous day and night making sure of the stag’s location. On the morning of the hunt he reports to his chief, the huntsman. The huntsman brings in older, experienced hounds, called “tufters,” to separate the stag from the herd. It was this singling-out that I was watching in the steep moorland pasture. But it hadn’t been working perfectly. As unpromising as that young stag may have been from the harbourer’s point of view, the two hinds thought he was worth running away with. Once the stag is solitary, the huntsman’s assistant, the “whipper-in,” is supposed to bring up the full pack, and the hunt’s members and guests fall in behind the hounds. Miles and miles of furiously galloping cross-country endeavor at achievement of ecological balance in the Exmoor deer herds ensues. Unless it doesn’t. As it seemed not to be doing from my vantage point across the valley. When the chase does happen, the usual outcome is that the stag, at last, turns and “stands at bay,” facing the hounds. Then (rather disappointingly for those whose imaginations run to tenderhearted indignation or to bloodlust) the hounds do not tear the stag to shreds. They bark.
There’s probably not much else they could do with an irked and antler-waving stag. Staghounds are not giant Scottish deerhounds or hulking, red-eyed mastiffs. They’re just foxhounds, happy and hound-doggy and friendly if you aren’t prey. “You can set your baby down in the middle of a pack,” a hunter told me, “and they’ll lick him silly.” What happens to the stag is that the huntsman walks over to it and prosaically shoots it in the head with a special, short-barreled, folding-stock shotgun. This is an illegal weapon in Great Britain. But on stag hunts it’s legally required.
Speaking of Britain’s laws, killing wild mammals with the aid of dogs, as the Exmoor hunt was trying to do, is forbidden. Except when—as I understand the parliamentary Hunting Act of 2004—it is mandatory. The act contains certain conditions for “exempt hunting” that allow the killing of wild mammals with the aid of dogs if “as soon as possible after being found or flushed out the wild mammal is shot dead by a competent person.” No letting it go, even if it’s Bambi’s mother. Furthermore only two dogs may be used at a time. And no letting the dogs kill the wild mammals, the way foxhunters always have done. The stain must be upon you, not your pet. “Out, damned spot,” indeed.
The Hunting Act came into effect on February 18, 2005, a few weeks before this Exmoor meet. I got in touch with Adrian Dangar, the hunting correspondent for The Field. Adrian said that I shouldn’t write about foxhunting. It’s all that anybody was writing about. And it’s such a social occasion. He said that the stag hunters were a much more doughty and resolute lot, and stag hunting was more of a way of life.
I went to Exmoor with Adrian. We stayed with the chairman of the stag hunt. I’ll call him Michael Thompson. He was doughty and resolute, the owner of a family sheep farm of centuries’ standing. I went to the meet expecting a scene of American seething, full of the half-suppressed violence that Americans thwarted in their beliefs or their hobbies half-suppress so well. What I found was a cheerful, natty crowd on horseback, booted and spurred and listening to a talk from the hunt secretary about strict adherence to the Hunt Act, especially in the matter of using just two dogs. The whole staghound pack was there, but the hounds had been split into pairs, with each twosome in the back of a different vehicle. The hunt secretary gave her opinion that hunting the pairs serially was in accord with the letter and spirit of the law.
Having just two dogs in the field was exactly the problem. So I was told by the retired grocer and other hunt followers gathered on the hilltop vantage point, watching the lack of action through binoculars. Two hounds were not enough to break the stag away from the hinds. Or two hounds were not enough to bring the stag to bay. Two hounds were certainly not enough to make what I was told was the music of a pack in full cry.
The followers were local farmers and farm wives, mostly past middle age. Many had ridden with the hunt years before. The men wore tweed jackets and neckties. The women wore tweed skirts and twinsets. Everyone wore a waxed cotton Barbour jacket. The hunt members were dressed in black and brown riding coats, buff whipcord breeches, and hunting bowlers. They wore elaborately tied and gold-pinned white stocks at their throats. All the clothes were seasoned and washed to a perfect Ralph Lauren degree. If hunting dies out, from where will Ralph draw outdoorsy English inspiration? Will suburban Americans be wearing the undershirts, rolled trousers, and hankies-on-the-head of English sunbathers?
The hunt was moving. Horses were trotting over the far hill. The two hounds did their best in the music department. There was a spate of elderly, excited driving as hunt followers hurried to find a better view. We parked by a tributary of the River Exe. The stag either did or didn’t go into a strip of woods along the bank. The hounds weren’t sure. The followers weren’t sure. Possibly the stag came out of the woods. Possibly he didn’t. The hunters went into the woods and came out. This sounds as interesting as cricket. And to the onlookers it was. The crowd had grown to forty or more and now included children in small tweeds and small Barbour coats and a man selling tea and sandwiches from a van. They all watched intently, the tea vendor included. There was a tense murmuring, as from a golf gallery.
The staghounds and stag hunters trotted through a farmyard, and I followed on foot. Some local farmers are not hospitable to the traffic through their property—not hospitable, specifically, to the traffic of me. I was trying to take notes and make haste and avoid deep puddles and horse droppings, and I wasn’t wearing a necktie. “Is he all right?” I heard a farmer ask.
“He thought you were an ‘anti,’” the retired grocer explained later. “They come around bothering the hunts.”
According to a brochure from the League Against Cruel Sports, “The League . . . has collected an enormous amount of evidence of the cruelty of hunting. Years of undercover work and hunt monitoring has enabled [members of Parliament] to see the real face of hunting.”
Beyond the farm, on the Exmoor upland, the real face of hunting was soaking wet. The scenery was an alluring frustration: heather-covered bosomy hill mounds rising above dark nests of woods. A green girlfriend of a landscape. But somebody else’s girlfriend, greeting the hunt with cold drizzle and sharp wind.
This buoyed everyone’s spirits. The British manner of cheerfully not complaining can’t be maintained when there’s nothing to cheerfully not complain about. Forty horses ran across the moor. Stag hunting is not as show-offy as fox-hunting. There’s no jumping of ditches, hedges, and gates. Exmoor is wet through like a bath sponge; no use ditching it for drainage. The hedges are as high as tennis backboards and grow from stone heaps piled up since Roman times. And the farmers leave the gates open because some things are more important than keeping sheep in. I witnessed none of the hat-losing, horse-flipping spectacles seen in engravings on the walls of steak houses. And to be truthful, my entire knowledge of hunting on horseback has been gained by staring at such decor between courses. What sort of engravings will steak houses hang on the paneling 100 years hence? Pictures of people in Pilates classes?
The excitement in stag hunting comes from the treacherous footing on the soaked, peat-slick moors and from the great length of the stag chase and the great speed of the stag’s run. It can also be dangerous just sitting on a horse. A young woman fell off while the hunt was gathered by the riverbank. A medical evacuation helicopter was called. The hunt was uninterrupted.
The Exmoor stag hunters distribute a brochure, in Q&A form, arguing that stag hunting is not particularly inhumane. “Hunters” might well be substituted for “deer.”
Q. But deer must be terrified by stag hunting!
A. . . . Deer pay no more heed . . . than a grazing wildebeest (so often seen on TV) does to a pride of lions lunching off a mate nearby.
I had been offered a tame mount on which to follow the hunt.
“How tame?” I asked.
“Very tame.”
“There was,” I said, “a man who used to come through my neighborhood in the 1950s with a pony and a camera . . .”
“Not that tame.”
But I was inspired, watching the hunters dash around on the moor. The horses were beautiful, as tall as those that pull wagons in beer commercials but as gracefully made as what I’d lost fifty dollars on in last year’s Kentucky Derby. I vowed to learn to ride—as soon as they got the middle part of horses to be lower to the ground and had the saddles made by BarcaLounger.
Wind, rain, and temperature grew worse. The hunt descended into a precipitous dell where I’d have thought the riders would have to walk their mounts. They didn’t. But I couldn’t even walk myself. I returned to where the hunt followers were gathered by the side of a road. The followers were disturbed. A pale and agitated young couple were walking down the road. Surely these were “antis.” They were dressed head to toe in black.
But the boy and the girl were just lost backpackers who’d made the mistake of going out into nature for fun. The entertainments of nature are of a sterner kind. They were wet and miserable. The hunters were not, or didn’t feel that they were. But the stag and every trace of it had vanished, and the hunters decided to “pack it in, to spare the horses.”
Michael, Adrian, and I headed back to Michael’s farm in his horse van, a bit disappointed. And then through the van windows came that music I’d been told about: the full cry of a pack. It is a bouillabaisse of a noise, with something in it of happy kids on a playground, honking geese headed for your decoys, and the wheee of a deep-sea fishing reel when you’ve hooked something huge. This particular music was being sung soprano. A beagle pack, thirty-some strong, was bounding across a pasture. We got out and hurried in the direction of the chase. Beagling is like foxhunting or stag hunting except that the quarry is hare, and it’s done without benefit of horses. Beaglers follow the pack—at a very brisk pace—on foot. Hunting hares with beagles is banned by the Hunting Act. But rabbits can still be hunted. “Because they’re considered pests,” Michael said. “Because of lot of Labour voters hunt rabbits,” Adrian said. Also, for some reason, “the hunting of a hare which has been shot,” is permitted.
The pack arced away from us across a broad field. Just as it did, the hare that the beagles weren’t supposed to be hunting came at the three of us with a speed hardly credible in a land animal. If it had been less nimble (and bigger) it would have bowled us over. The dogs seemed to have lost the scent.
“The hare went that way!” Michael shouted to the master of the beagle hounds.
“The shot hare!” Adrian shouted.
“You mean the ‘bush rabbit’!” the master shouted back. Interesting to wonder how many of the MPs voting for the Hunting Act would know a rabbit from a hare if it turned up in their Easter basket. Maybe on a menu.
We spent an hour with the beagles. They no more got a bush rabbit than Michael and Adrian had got a stag, but the clambering and clamor of the beagles were a joy. I’m a strong advocate for animal rights. I am an animal. I belong to Animal NATO—us, dogs, horses (cats are France). And I belong to Animal WTO. We export feed to sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, and, to maintain the balance of trade, we eat them.
The Thompsons gave a dinner that night. Their house was of Middlemarch era but with fewer old bores writing the Key to All Mythologies, and more stag heads on the walls. The main course was pork roast from a farm pig, rather than venison from the Exmoor stag (which in any case would have needed to hang for a week). Miscellaneous small terriers sat on guests’ laps.
The consensus of the party was that the hunting ban had to do less with loving animals than with bullying people. This was not a class struggle, I was told. The working class was all for hunting, said one guest. And she was a Labour peer. Nor was it, she said (she herself proved the point) a Labour-Tory conflict. Instead, all agreed, a certain kind of today’s urban elite was getting its own back at what they saw as a traditional elite that had no use, as Michael Thompson put it, for people “with shaved heads and five earrings and their husbands just as bad.” But, all agreed again, hunts aren’t as posh as they used to be—and they never were.
There’s truth to this, judging from the foxhunting prose laureate R. S. Surtees, who had his h-dropping London shopkeeper Jorrocks hunting with passion in the 1830s. Anthony Trollope wrote, “Surely no man has labored at it as I have done, or hunted under such drawbacks as to distances, money, and natural disadvantages. I am very heavy, very blind. . . . Nor have I ever been in truth a good horseman. . . . But it has been for more than thirty years a duty to me to ride to hounds.”
The word “duty” must seem strange to people not involved in field sports, to today’s urban elites who don’t see the look on the dog’s face when the laptop instead of the gun cabinet is opened during bird season. Of course it’s tempting to think that the word “duty” always seems strange to modern urban elites.
Still, in a way, the bullies are understandable. There’s a certain satisfaction in taking something away from people perceived as having been too certain and self-confident for too long, people who’ve dominated society but whose dominance is slipping away. Network news anchors come to mind.
Then again, the bullies aren’t understandable. Adrian used to be the master of foxhounds for a hunt in northern England. At the annual hunt ball antis protested outside. “With balaclavas pulled down like the IRA,” said Adrian. “One told me, ‘We’ll smash up your car tonight, Adrian.’ They knew me by name. They didn’t smash my car. They broke every window in my house. I found my dog and her litter of pups covered in shards of glass.”
Several of the other guests hunted foxes as well as stags. This was Thursday night. There was a big fox hunt on Saturday, and Sunday was Easter. Conversation turned to how to get Easter shopping done. Shopping on Good Friday was a bit inappropriate, wasn’t it? (There are no atheists in fox hunts.)
The fox hunts were doing all right since the hunting ban. They’d taken up “drag hunting.” Someone rides ahead pulling cloth soaked in fox scent behind him. The hounds and the hunters follow his course. And if an actual fox pops up along the way . . . well, who can blame the dogs? Ninety-one foxes were killed on the first day of the hunting ban. But what will the country pub of the future be named? “The Something That Smells Like a Fox and Hounds”?
Did the antis have, I asked, any moral point? Yes, a great point—of moral vanity. God didn’t make the world good enough for them. Cheese was served. Port was passed. Adrian quoted Surtees: “It’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty percent its danger.”
In a nearly identical cultivated, sonorous voice Michael Hobday, spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports, answered my questions a week later in London. The League Against Cruel Sports was founded in 1924, with antecedents dating to Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty. Here are a few of the League’s past presidents: Edith Sitwell, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, the Rt. Hon. Earl of Listowel, the Reverend Lord Soper. And a brochure published by the League shows how long and deep is the controversy in Britain about man and his relationship with the animals that are his friends, his relatives, and his dinner. In 1822 Britain passed a law against improper treatment of cattle, the first animal-welfare legislation in history. In 1835 Britain outlawed dogfighting, cockfighting, and bull, bear, and badger baiting. In 1929 the Labour Party adopted a platform plank opposing blood sports (although it held four parliamentary majorities before it fulfilled that campaign promise). “There’s a long history of criticism of hunting,” Mr. Hobday said. “The people who established the League Against Cruel Sports had a background in the humanitarian movement—animal suffering, welfare of children, prohibition.”
I didn’t ask if the humanitarian movement had trouble prioritizing. I did ask, “Why the focus on hunting rather than, say, factory farming, with its animal penitentiaries?”
“The reasons are twofold,” Mr. Hobday said. “Firstly, foxhunting is an emotive issue. The sight of the blood and gore tugs at the heartstrings. It makes powerful television. Secondly,” Mr. Hobday said, “hunting is done for entertainment. It’s a sport.”
I asked why the law permitted hunting rabbits but not hares.
“The League’s view is that cruelty to any animal in the name of sport is wrong. Parliament’s view was to make a distinction between activities that were ‘necessary’ and activities that were undertaken for sport. The Countryside Alliance has a vested interest in pointing out loopholes.”
The Countryside Alliance is the principal British pro-hunting group. Apparently both the League and the Alliance enjoy majority support among the British public. According to a 1997 Gallup poll for The Daily Telegraph, 80 percent of Britons disapproved of hunting foxes with hounds. According to a 2004 ICM poll for The Sunday Telegraph, 70 percent of Britons believed the police should not enforce the hunting ban.
I wanted to know why hunting (that is, chasing animals with dogs) was banned but shooting (pointing or flushing animals with dogs) wasn’t.
“With shooting,” Mr. Hobday said, “there are clear steps that people can take to minimize suffering.”
Being a better shot was the only one I could think of, and I’ve been trying for forty years to no avail.
“Using a pack of dogs,” Mr. Hobday continued, “with the best will in the world you can’t do much about the cruelty. And in practical terms it’s impossible to have legislation that covers everything.”
I asked if class conflict was involved in the hunting ban.
“From our perspective,” Mr. Hobday said, “there’s no class element at all. Hare coursing is banned, though it’s working class.” (Hare coursing is letting greyhounds chase hares in a field—a sort of libertarian dog racing without the bother of a track,) “In the minds of ordinary people,” Mr. Hobday said, hunting is “not an issue of class but an issue of behavior. Hunters are seen to behave in a very arrogant fashion—hunts going through smallholdings and gardens. Hunters are very poor about apologizing. There’s an attitude of entitlement by hunters: ‘It’s our land and we have the right.’”
And that, in America, would be all the apologizing needed. I mentioned how different America was—how Senator Kerry hadn’t been able to get through his presidential campaign without going on a goose hunt, so there’d be a photo of him holding a gun.
“But not a goose,” Mr. Hobday said.
Mr. Hobday told me an anecdote, though he said he couldn’t vouch for it personally. Someone on the League’s staff had told it to him. At a protest against foxhunting, before the ban, one of the protesters had gone up to a hunter and said, “We’re going to make what you do illegal.”
The hunter looked down from his horse and said, “People like you obey the law. People like us make the law.”
This is an anecdote contradicted by what I saw in Exmoor, and exactly opposite to what has happened legislatively, but it still makes good telling. If you understand it, you may understand what’s going on in Britain. I don’t.
I walked from the offices of the League Against Cruel Sports, in Southwark, to the nearby Tate Modern, to look at the works of Damien Hirst. He is the artist who has floated a sheep in formaldehyde and sliced a cow into sections and so forth for the sake of sculpture. He is a today’s-urban-elite kind of artist—cutting edge, one might say. Unfortunately, the Tate Modern had only one piece by Hirst on display: some seashells with a curator’s commentary on the wall beside them:
“You kill things to look at them,” Hirst has said. In this work he arranges a selection of ornate shells, purchased in Thailand, inside a glass cabinet. Resembling a museum display case [for Pete’s sake, it was a museum display case], it alludes to the 19th century tradition of collecting and classifying natural specimens. Inevitably, the approach involves removing plants and animals from their natural habitats, killing them in order to preserve them . . .
But Hirst was not buying seashells for sport.
In the grassy median of Park Lane, near Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner, is the Animals in War memorial—“Unveiled 24 November 2004 by Princess Anne.” Its two sweeping curves of concrete wall resemble parts of a non-Euclidian traffic barrier. On the inside of one curve is carved THEY HAD NO CHOICE. Bronze pack mules march toward the gap between the walls. Beyond the gap a bronze dog and a bronze horse walk away, metaphorically in heaven, though actually farther up Park Lane. A eulogy mentions even pigeons. No need to cast one in bronze, though, with so many live ones alighting on the monument.
Here are some British newspaper items I collected on my visit:
A leading cancer charity has rejected a £30,000 donation from the organizer of sponsored bird shoots because it does not approve of the way the money was raised.
—The Sunday Telegraph, March 20
Professor John Webster, emeritus professor at Bristol University, discussed the intelligence of chickens at a conference organized by Compassion in World Farming. . . . They are intelligent, sensitive characters.
—The Times, March 31
Nine New Forest firefighters were involved in freeing a frog from the spout of a watering can. A gardener took the trapped frog to the fire station. . . . It was released after half an hour’s vigorous cutting with a hacksaw.
—The Times, March 28
As for the well-being of people:
A middle-aged teacher is starting a six-month jail sentence today because she decided to fight back against “yobs” with a pellet gun. Linda Walker, 47, . . . was being driven towards breaking point by groups of youth “terrorizing” her neighborhood. . . . She rushed out of her house at night to confront a knot of teenagers. . . . After an exchange of abuse . . . Mrs. Walker squared up to one 18-year-old, firing off several rounds from the [compressed air-powered] pistol into nearby ground. . . . Mrs. Walker was found guilty of affray and possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.
—The Times, March 30
Of course, there’s always the possibility that barmy Britannia—or a certain political part of her—is crazy like a . . .
The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics. Politicians don’t exactly want to ban hunting or forbid shooting teen goons with BBs. Politicians just want to turn everything, right down to what the dog chases, into a political matter. And they’ve succeeded. The day I arrived in Britain Tony Blair was beginning his run for reelection. The campaign issue making headlines was school lunch menus.
Ordinary people have ordinary knowledge: how to make things (including lunch), grow things, fix things, build things, and, for that matter, kill things. Politicians have extraordinary knowledge: how all things ought to be. Never mind that politicians do not, as it were, run with the hare or hunt with the hounds.
All things ought to be, as far as I’m concerned, the way they were on Michael Thompson’s farm. When the dinner after the stag hunt was over, at one in the morning, Michael got up from the table and said, “I’m going to change my trousers and have a look at the lambing.”
More than 1,000 of his ewes were giving or about to give birth. A vet comes with a portable machine and gives them sonograms—better service than yuppie moms get. If a ewe is having one lamb, she can be left on her own in the fields. But twins can confuse a ewe, especially if it’s her first lambing. She may not know if both or either is hers. Michael went into a shed the size of a modest railroad station, where hundreds of sheep were in twenty or so pens. Then he climbed onto a wooden railing separating two banks of pens and, though he is seventy and had done as much justice to the wine at dinner as I had, walked the rail’s length looking for newborns. When he spotted a pair, Michael would jump among the sheep, hoist each lamb by a leg, and begin backing toward the pen’s gate. This would cause at first a few, then a couple, then, usually, just one of the ewes to follow him—the others dropping back with, frankly, sheepish looks as they (I guess) realized they hadn’t had any lambs yet. Then mother and children were put in a stall to bond.
The lambs were still damp from birth, making their first steps, quad-toddling with each little hoof boxing the compass. They were adorable. Also, rather frequently, they were dead. Scores of dead lambs lay in the aisle of the lambing shed, nature being profligate with adorability. As man is. The living lambs would be dead soon enough. Delicious, too.
Tempting to meditate on how vivid and real the lambing was compared with politics. Except that Michael’s farm is itself a political construct. Sheep farming is heavily subsidized in Great Britain. Without the subsidies the green grazing in the valley of the River Exe would be gone. The handsome agricultural landscape of which the British are so proud, carefully husbanded since Boudicca’s day, would be replaced by natural growth. The most likely growth is real estate developments. There’s room for any number of charming weekend getaway homes where the tired politicians of London could get some relaxation and perhaps provide their constituents with a bit of sport—of a noncontroversial kind. According to the Hunting Act, “The hunting of rats is exempt.”