National Trust & Forestry England will be complicit in criminal violence if they don’t ban hunting for good
Major landowners the National Trust, Forestry England, and United Utilities have temporarily suspended trail hunting on their land after the police announced that they will investigate leaked webinars that allegedly exposed ways of covering up illegal fox hunting. The webinars were attended by more than 150 hunt masters from all over the country. In one video a senior hunt official says that trail hunting is used as a smokescreen “to portray to the people watching that you’re going about legitimate business”.
Although the announcement by the landowners is welcome news, it doesn’t go far enough. They need to ban trail hunting for good. And we need a total ban on all fox hunting. Now.
What is trail hunting?
The term ‘trail hunting’ was introduced following the passing of the 2004 Hunting Act, making it illegal to hunt wild animals with hounds. It enabled hunters to get around the new legislation, pretending that they were doing a ‘lawful’ sport, while continuing to murder animals. If a group is trail hunting, their dogs are supposedly following an artificially-laid scent and not the scent of a wild animal.
Robert Pownall, founder of anti-hunting organisation Keep The Ban, explained to The Canary that trail hunting is:
nothing but a cover up for illegal fox hunting, and week in week out there are incidents of wildlife being ripped to pieces with hunts claiming these to be “accidents”. … Trail hunting is nothing but a trail of lies.
National Trust and Forestry England need to go further
Pownall commended the decision by the landowners to temporarily suspend trail hunting, but argued that they need to go further:
Whilst the decision made by Forestry England to suspend trail hunts could have come sooner, it is nonetheless welcome and we implore Forestry England to seriously review its position on trail hunting and for the temporary suspension to become a permanent one.
Read on...
Campaigners have documented numerous acts of illegal fox and stag hunting on National Trust and Forestry England land over the years. And yet the landowners have continued to grant licences for the trail hunting of foxes. For this most recent hunting season, Forestry England granted ‘hunting licences for 34 fox and hare trail hunts’.
Pownall explained:
There already exists an abundance of evidence that hunts previously licenced by both Forestry England and the National Trust have acted unlawfully, with two of the licensed/previously licensed trail hunts having been associated with convictions under the Hunting and Animal Welfare Acts.
So if this is the case, why don’t the National Trust and Forestry England just permanently ban trail hunting? The Canary asked both landowners this. The National Trust declined to answer the question. Instead, it replied:
We are aware of videos circulating on social media showing two Hunting Office training webinars earlier this year. As a result, we have taken the decision to pause trail hunting on National Trust land and will not be granting any new licences for the remainder of the season. We do not currently have a date when this will be reviewed.
Forestry England was a bit more forthcoming and stated:
We have to wait for the police investigation to finish before we can begin to decide the future of our trail hunting licences.
The Canary also asked both landowners how they would enforce the suspension on their land. The National Trust declined to answer, while Forestry England stated:
Anyone who is acting illegally in the forests may be liable to prosecution.
“This should see an end to all hunting on their land”
Since the Hunting Act came into force, wildlife monitors and hunt saboteurs have gathered vast amounts of evidence, showing foxes and deer being murdered by hunts. So quite how the National Trust and Forestry England continue to grant licences to such criminals is a mystery.
Bobbie Armstrong is a monitor for Somerset Wildlife Crime. She told The Canary:
The content of the webinars exposed what we believe to be clear admissions of hunting act breaches and deliberate attempts to conceal law breaking. We would suggest that this throws into question how organisations such as the National Trust or Forestry Commission can ever truly and genuinely, with the burden of their responsibility as landowners, ever issue licences for hunts to operate on their land again. This should see an end to all hunting on their land.
Armstrong continued:
The evidence is credible. The opinions are overwhelming, and the responsibility to do the right thing now rests firmly with these organisations, and that is to ban all hunts permanently and to go much further by actually enforcing that ban.
If the National Trust and Forestry England continue to grant licences for trail hunting after the police investigation ends, it is clear that they will both continue to be complicit in criminal violence.
Featured image via rottonara / Pixabay
Get involved
Keep The Ban is calling for the public to sign a petition, calling on Forestry England to permanently ban trail hunting. You can sign it here.
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Talk about stupid, idiotic bunny-huggers.
First of all, you can never stop fox hunting. Around 400,000 foxes are killed every year in this country. So this is really only about hunting with fox hounds. And since even they only used to kill a bit more than 20,000 foxes a year, it is some kind of bizarre political class war, that uses the void of public ignorance and fills with a tissue of selective emotional rubbish, lies and exaggerations that have little foundation or relevance or fact at any level.
Quite apart from the invented class war, hunting with hounds was better (least worse) for foxes than all the alternative forms of control.
With hounds the weakest foxes were the easiest to exterminate, so hunting with hounds maintained evolutionary pressure and selection. Poisoning, snaring and shooting are all nonselective.
Hounds kills a fox in a bit over ten seconds, once caught, and few foxes ever escaped once caught. Wounded and injured foxes emerge in all other methods.
Snaring results in a slow, painful death. Death is less than 50% immediate from shooting at 100 yds and only a bit more effective at 50yds, resulting in thousands of badly wounded foxes dying slowly.
In the past, farmers might leave a few foxes “for the hunt to attend to” but now they feel obliged to shoot at them or gas them.
Gassing is a complicated business (because of restrictions on chemicals) that is expensive and it injures or kills slowly. It is far from perfect, and since the whole thing is a pain in the pooper, it is easier just to block den entrances and use the exhaust from a quad bike. Not a good way to go. Alternatively, a ball of mince and rat poison does the trick, producing a revolting death that takes days from organ failure.
So, hunting with hounds was the most humane method and also supported a large equestrian industry.
Meanwhile, illegal hunting is unaffected by the law because criminals don’t care about the law. Bans don’t affect criminals. They produce criminals. They certainly don’t save any foxes.
The hound ban hasn’t done the environment any good. It hasn’t done farmers any good. It hasn’t done horse owners any good. It certainly hasn’t done foxes any favours and has increased their suffering enormously.
Haven’t you done well……..you’ve actually hurt foxes just to cuddle your emotions.