I don't hunt - indeed, I've never been. It doesn't happen to be my preferred sport. But, nonetheless, I believe we should repeal the Hunting Act 2004. Here's why.
Humans kill other animals for a number of reasons. We eat them. We gather their skins and fur for clothing. We use their bones and oils, their bladders and bowels. We kill animals that threaten us - from man-eating crocodiles to malarial mosquitoes to common wasps. We also kill animals that compete with us, such as rats in our houses, birds on farms, seals in the ocean, and foxes.
The fox is a splendidly adaptable creature. It is widespread and by no means rare. Indeed, in many rural areas foxes are so numerous and voracious that without their numbers being controlled they would have a material commercial impact upon farmers. Few serious informed people dispute this. Almost everyone serious agrees that foxes must be killed; the question at issue for them is how.
I, however, wish mainly to engage with those that are not serious and not informed, for as it happens I believe they are the key drivers of opposition to fox hunting. We live in a society dominated by city-dwellers who have their meat presented to them as bacon, sausage, mince - so distant in appearance from the animals that died to provide it that they can turn their eyes away from that death and half-pretend that it was not an integral part of their entertainment. And "entertainment" is certainly the correct word for most city-dweller meat eating. We eat vastly more meat than could be required for any nutritioual purpose. We have animals killed to provide us with entertainment, but we pretend to ourselves that this is not so.
Indeed, our denial goes further than this. How socially respectable is someone that kills animals for us - say, someone that works in an abattoir? Suppose that you met an abattoir worker and he said he found satisfaction in his job, perhaps even enjoyed his work? I suspect you would feel embarrassed, rather appalled, perhaps even disgusted. It's okay, somehow, for us to be entertained by the product of animals' death, but it's not okay for someone else to enjoy anything about the process of killing.
And yet, do we think the cheetah does not enjoy the chase and the kill? Should the cormorant be embarrassed by her speed and elegance in catching the fish? Or is the idea that, somehow, we should be "better than that"? Is it supposed to be some part of civilisation that we stop enjoying the hunt and the kill? Is enjoying anything about a death "barbaric"?
But what if someone does not share your standard? What if she wants to enjoy her nature, to revel in the rewards of instinct, to delight in bloodlust and the thrill of the chase? Is it your business to prevent her?
Of course, we have some standards in respect of the treatment of animals. In the Christian tradition that is the basis of our law and culture, Man is the steward of nature, and God's model for the management of nature is the Garden, not a wilderness. Good stewardship of nature imposes various duties of care in our relationship with animals. But that does not extend to the forbidding of killing or the enjoyment of killing, provided that such killing is not improperly torturous.
And, of course, this question of how unpleasant is the hunt for the animals concerned was central to the inquiries on hunting. But the evidence I have seen on this appeared confused to me. For it set up a distinction between the anxiety and stress for the fox in the hunt and what it would experience "in nature". But Man is not separate from nature. He is a part of Creation, an animal like other animals (though of course unique in himself, and not simply equal in moral status to other animals - another matter that confuses some of the anti-hunting lobby). What Man does in hunting foxes is part of nature.
When we talk of cruelty to animals, we should mean things like deliberately subjecting them to pain and mockery for our entertainment, abusing our power over them - as for example in Huckleberry Finn where we read that the "loafers" get entertainment from "putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death"; or neglecting them - say when animals are not fed properly, or when large dogs are never exercised and become very fat. Abuse in such cases is clear. The very complexity of the studies used to claim that foxes suffer in the hunt should tell us that something different is occurring in these cases.
From what I've said, it will not be obvious whether I favour permitting hunting only in cases where culling or the killing of a particular human-competing fox is required, or whether I would also support foxes being bred specially to be hunted for entertainment. And indeed I'm not completely sure on the rights and wrongs of this point. It isn't so obvious to me that it is more wrong to breed a fox to chase and kill it purely for entertainment than it is to breed a pig to kill and eat it purely for entertainment or to breed a mink to kill and wear it purely for entertainment. But I'm content to compromise here. The tradition in Britain was, up to the Hunting Act, that foxes should not be bred purely for hunting. Instead, there were foxes that needed to be killed some way or another - poisoning, being shot, being hunted with dogs. And if they were going to be killed anyway, one might as well have fun doing it. I'm content with that.
