Annunziata Rees-Mogg, brother of Jacob, has made an announcement. Her name is Italian for annunciation, usually taken to refer to the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. As if that family did not already have enough of a sense of its own importance. People who want to see an end to trail hunting are exclusively “animal rights campaigners” and what we want, in our ignorance is “20,000 dead dogs”. Yup, that’s what we want. So she admits that all of their hounds would be culled. Well they shoot them anyway if they are deemed temperamentally unsuited or once they are past their prime. The hunting fraternity do not care about their dogs. It is a lie that they cannot be rehomed in a loving and kind environment, however traumatised by their cruel treatment they might be. Surely the least Annunziata and her ilk could do would be to care for them in their retirement?
Brother Jacob meanwhile said: “It was wonderful to see so many people supporting the Mendip Farmers [hunt] at Priddy for Boxing Day”.
That trail hunting is a “smokescreen”, let’s not forget, comes not from animal lovers but from the leaked webinar of the hunts’ governing body itself.
Here’s hunt master and farmer Hugo Mann: “”Farming is lonely enough as it is, and without this, I would just carry on at the farm. I wouldn’t see anyone … A ban would be catastrophic for our rural community, we’re the threads that run through the whole of our area … It’s a great point for rural people to meet each other in the darkest depths of winter, when they don’t see many people … It’s really just a real community we’ve created with hunting, like any sport, it just binds people together.” How sad. I am sorry they are lonely but not as lonely as a family of fox cubs without their mother. Couldn’t they just meet for a picnic or go for a nice walk, without terrorising and killing any animals – or would these disturbed individuals not be temperamentally suited? What would be the point, they presumably wonder, if there is to be no satiation of their bloodlust.
The old class war argument has come up again as the hunts begin to panic, almost comedically (the latest news is that a ban would only come into force in the far too distant 2030). Has there ever been an element of class war in the minds of some sabs, especially in the early days? No doubt. That does not invalidate the argument that this is not a sport. And anyway, they started it. Fox hunting is, or at the very least has its origins in, an act of aggression towards the common people, a display and assertion of authority and power, of the notion of private property imported here by William the Conqueror.
Nick Hayes puts it brilliantly in his The Book of Trespass, Bloomsbury Circus, 2020 (in a nutshell, he is all for trespass): “… the green jackets and leather boots are relics from the uniforms worn by the duke’s yeomen, the private army that each lord kept to underscore his rule of the land. Yeomen were used to mete out justice, the arm of the rule of law that in feudal times was the whim of the landowner … The hunt is a reassertion of the right to go anywhere the fox takes them, over hedges, fences, farmed fields and public highways.”
I am not convinced in any case that a desire to demolish feudalism is the same as class war. And it is certainly not common to all animal lovers, people who care about animal welfare.
As for the “rural community”, this does not consist solely of hunters and so-called sportsmen, indeed the support for (trail) hunting, or, rather, lack of it is pretty much the same in both rural and urban areas.
Even if there were no animal cruelty involved, the sheer chaos and carnage, the trespass, the collateral damage, these are enough to justify ending trail hunting. Now.
Tim Bonner: “When Keir Starmer said he wanted a new relationship with the countryside, we all assumed he meant a better one, but in 18 months his government has alienated rural people and created the clear impression that it does not care about the countryside. Its warped priorities have put taxing family farms, raising rates for rural businesses and banning trail hunting above policies that would benefit rural people. While the partial changes to the family farm tax are a step in the right direction, the government must desperately learn the fundamental lesson of this policy debacle, which is that it needs to work with the rural community – not legislate against it.”
Most people I think don’t really understand (and I certainly don’t) why farmers should have special tax exemptions in the first place. Nor agree that they should. Banning trail hunting is not “not caring about the countryside” or attacking rural communities, it is precisely the opposite.
They will continue to rant and rave and to perpetuate their lies. But everyone else has long since had enough.
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