A horrible part of me thoroughly enjoyed seeing those braying toffs given a good kicking by their erstwhile guardians, the police.
It was the same largely subsumed, partially reconstituted Trot part of me that yearns, on occasion, for the declaration of unrestrained class war: Mugabe-style land reform, inheritance tax whacked up to 99.9%, closure of the public schools and vindictive police harassment — like black people have to put up with now — of anybody seen wearing green wellington boots.
The Countryside Alliance is right about one thing: many of us who are opposed to foxhunting also possess a dark and atavistic dislike of the people who take part in it, primarily on grounds of class envy and visceral loathing. I made this fairly obvious point a couple of years ago in a newspaper and was required to resign my BBC job.
Yes, I’m absolutely delighted, for all the wrong reasons. But a desire to see one’s enemies enraged and deprived of their fun does not constitute grounds for banning hunting with hounds. It’s just a lovely bonus. Because, never mind the toffs, we’re not much keener on the semi-literate, forelock-tugging peasants who puff and pant after the hounds on foot and are more than happy, m’lud, to mop up the excrement left behind in exchange for feudal patronage and maybe a glass of sherry. Collectivisation of the kulaks is surely overdue.
“Civil war!” the Daily Mail shrieked on Thursday morning. Well, with just 10,000 people in attendance, I don’t think so. But even if it is civil war, we’ll win, no matter how many pampered offspring of boring pop stars are suborned into action for the forces of reaction.
But a spiteful dislike of the people is one thing. What the Countryside Alliance forgets is that it is entirely possible to dislike the people and, entirely separately — and more rationally — believe foxhunting to be cruel and morally repellent. Just as we find those blood sports that were historically beloved by yer honest working classes — cock fighting, dog fighting, bear baiting — cruel and thus morally repellent.
If there is a class angle to this affair it is merely a quiet anger and resentment that foxhunting has survived unscathed for so long when brutalities perpetrated by the lower orders have been banned for decades or indeed centuries.
But then the Countryside Alliance keeps pressing the wrong buttons. Foxhunting is not cruel, its spokesmen aver. I’ve even heard them argue that the foxes actually, you know, quite like it, the thrill of the chase — until they’re ripped to pieces. And they don’t really mind being ripped to pieces either. Nobody swallows this rot, any more than they believe the argument that the fox is always killed outright by a clinical “nip” to the back of the head by the leading slavering canine assassin.
They’ll even tell you, if you bother to listen for long enough, that foxes are cruel too. Have you ever looked in a hen coop after a fox has paid a visit, they exclaim? They kill for the sake of killing, foxes. Maybe: but that’s because they’ve got very low IQs and don’t know any better. It comes, most likely, from being inbred over countless generations (is this beginning to ring any bells, by the way?) They have no conception of personal responsibility and only the slenderest grasp of Judaeo-Christian morality. That’s foxes for you.
Still less are we prepared to shed tears for the thousands of hounds allegedly facing extermination when the ban comes into force: we know that they are exterminated anyway, with cold pragmatism, when they’ve outlasted their usefulness to the hunt. At about the age of four.
Do not try to kid us that the way you treat your hounds is evidence of a deep love and respect for animals. Your view of animals is wholly and unrepentantly utilitarian: animals are there quite simply to be used up.
Likewise, the economic argument is equally redundant: criminal activity is not morally justifiable simply because it creates money and sustains a few jobs — so all that guff about “tearing apart rural communities” and “putting hundreds of people out of work” is a massive overstatement and irrelevant. Believe me, it will not tear my rural community apart. I suspect that this is true of 90% of towns and villages.
It came up with an especially stupid new argument, the Countryside Alliance, earlier last week. A young lad, Byron Evans, was accidentally shot dead while out “lamping” (hunting foxes with rifles at night). Within hours the alliance or a spokesman for it blathered on about how this sort of incident would occur more frequently if hunting with hounds were to be banned.
Intrigued, I rang the alliance and asked it to quantify this suggestion: just how many children did its members expect to inadvertently shoot dead in the next 10 years if foxhunting was banned and should we, therefore, take their rifles off them as well? The alliance spokesman directed me to the Burns report — which suggests that other forms of controlling foxes (if, indeed, they need to be “controlled”, which I doubt) carried with them certain dangers. As an argument in support of hunting with hounds this is, frankly, pushing it a bit. How about you learn to shoot straight, huh? Later the alliance rang back and said that, on reflection, this was not an argument with which it wished to be officially associated. No kidding? There is another argument with which seemingly pro-hunters do not wish to be associated, perhaps because it is redolent of unbecoming selfishness. And yet it is the only argument which has any legal or philosophical force and — despite everything I’ve said above — almost clinches it for me. It is also the simplest and yet most profound of all arguments: we enjoy foxhunting, it’s terrific fun, and you have no moral grounds upon which to stop us doing it.
Rights for cute, whiskery Reynard are subordinate to our own rights, no matter how unpalatable you might think us to be. And how much you might like foxes. After all, we sanction a good many other cruelties for lesser reasons. Seen a battery chicken farm recently? Take a look inside and you’ll either give up eating most supermarket chicken or just try very hard to forget what you’ve seen. What’s more important; the right of an individual to have fun, or the rights of others to eat meat at a 30% lower cost than would otherwise be the case? I pull up sharpish at this argument — and all the other disingenuous bilge poured out by the pro-hunting lobby and the clear, obvious refutations of aforesaid bilge, dissolve. It is the only issue that matters.
The argument almost clinches it for me: almost, but not quite. As we slowly become more civilised, such cruelties seem less and less compatible with the perception we have of ourselves — and the rights of the individual are necessarily compromised or curtailed as a result. Gradually we modify our own behaviour and, when we need to, use the law to compel others to modify theirs.
So, today we get rid of foxhunting, because most people have quite rightly come to consider it a repulsive activity. And tomorrow, or the day after, maybe we’ll get rid of factory farming.
