Today is the first day of the hunting season. That is fox and stag. For anyone who cares this is a momentous time as it may be the last season ever. For the Labour Party it has turned into a test of Tony Blair's integrity. He promised many things before he was elected and this trivial, unimportant little bill is the one that his supporters have taken to heart. He would obviously give anything if it could be forgotten as it has split England pretty much into Town and Country and sparked off two Countryside Marches through London of hundreds of thousands of people. The biggest marches there have ever been. Last week there were gatherings all over the country where people pledged to carry on hunting even when it was outlawed and said that they were happy to go to prison to stand up for their human rights.

I wouldn't have been that interested a few years ago and also, as I am sentimental about animals to the point of insanity, I was totally anti-hunting too. But then we moved here.

This is probably the hunting epi-centre of the entire universe. It has the longest hunting season of anywhere in Europe practically as the stag and fox hunting run on at different times. Masses of French people suddenly appear around Easter when their season has finished. One of the villages near us is so given over to hunting that they realised every single person would be out of work if the Bill goes through. When we bought the farm it had a 'Hunting Clause' saying that we had to allow hunts over our land or we would be in breach of the sale agreement. We had been looking for somewhere to live for so long that I would have agreed to hunts riding through our house. The 'local people' obviously thought that as 'outsiders' we would probably try to get out of it and when we didn't they had their own ways of showing gratitude.

One evening a large dark van drew up in the farmyard, as usual I was on my own, and when I opened the kitchen door a strange man was standing there holding out a huge piece of bleeding meat. 'We've brought this for you. You deserve it as the stag was 'found' on your land and its the most prized part'. And apparently still warm.

The previous farmer was hunting mad. Every barn had a skeletal stag's scull with huge antlers nailed to the highest outside point and inside was covered with furry preserved heads on plaques. There were peculiar things made out of hoof and horn dotted about on every surface and when we were looking over the ruined wing of the house I suddenly noticed that the door wedge was actually the mummified leg of a deer.

Its hard to choose a way of killing things but at least the Hunt is regulated. They have their own vets and one of the huntsmen carries a pistol to give the stag an instant death. In the months after the sale when the farm was empty the poachers came. I won't write down the horrible things they did and how cruel they are. Without hunting that is how it will be; they will be everywhere. When the National Trust banned hunting from all its land some of the local farmers started to shoot any deer they saw amongst their crops and forty had died before there was a public outcry. The Hunt probably kill about ten in an entire season and they are picked out beforehand as ill or old.

I couldn't imagine that I would feel like this before I lived in a hunting community. My father lives in town and loves animals. He told me that only barbarians hunt and that obviously the answer was strategic culling of the herds by skilled marksmen. What skilled marksmen? It will be amateur merchant bankers paying for sport or poachers. We argued shoutily for a time on the phone and then he said an unforgiveable thing about my commitment to animal welfare and I couldn't bring myself to speak to him again. That was four years ago. I certainly never saw that coming.


- posted by Iris @ 11/02/2003 11:22:00 PM comment