MPs are weaponising the UK’s love of dogs to defend a doomed hunting industry

Protect the Wild has condemned a series of claims that MPs made in Parliament last week, warning that as a ban on trail hunting draws closer, defenders of the hunting industry are cynically weaponising foxhound welfare.

During a Commons debate on rural communities on 7 January, MPs Mark Pritchard, Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Joy Morrissey all raised the same talking point. Each claimed that banning trail hunting would lead to the mass killing of foxhounds.

Hunting industry already slaughters hounds

Campaign group Protect the Wild says this narrative is bogus. Charlotte Smith, Protect the Wild’s lead on hunting campaigns, said:

The hunting industry already kills its hounds. This is not a hypothetical future risk created by reform. It is a long-standing, routine practice that takes place every year, out of public view.

Undercover investigations have documented staff shooting foxhounds in the head once they regard them as surplus. Within hunting circles, it’s widely acknowledged that around 20% of hounds are culled annually, including young, healthy dogs who simply ‘do not make the grade’.

Protect the Wild also rejects the claim that foxhounds are impossible to rehome. Specialist rescues have already successfully rehomed thousands of foxhounds. Many spend their first months living in family homes with puppy walkers, proving they are capable of domestic life.

Smith said:

There is a growing tendency in this debate to appeal to people’s affection for dogs to defend trail hunting, and that risks obscuring the reality of how foxhounds are treated within the hunting industry today.

Hunts already euthanise hounds each year, including dogs that are young and healthy, and this is a reality that is rarely acknowledged. Foxhounds are dogs like any other working breed and, with proper support, many can and do go on to live successfully in homes.

If animal welfare is genuinely the priority, the focus should be on reducing surplus breeding and supporting responsible rehoming, rather than raising fears about outcomes that already occur to an extent under the current system.

Featured image via the Canary