A striking indicator of Whitehall’s failure to understand rural issues is that it has forced together as allies at the core of the Countryside Alliance two groups which detest each other. Ever since the Victorians developed game shooting, perhaps the most relentlessly hostile relationship in rural Britain has been that between huntsman and gamekeeper. Ironically, their irreconcilable difference concerns the fox. Without foxes, hunting with hounds is impossible, so the huntsman’s objective is the maintenance of a controlled, wild population. In contrast, for most modern gamekeepers “control” has come to mean the relentless extermination of foxes as vermin in order to maintain an unnaturally high population of artificially reared pheasants.

Rare surviving medieval artworks depict hunting on horseback as a noble sport dating from the great age of chivalry. It still has a very English code of fair conduct with a closed season to avoid killing pregnant vixens or those with cubs, which would otherwise be left to starve. To portray this wildly uneconomic but highly skilled and ancient craft as “pest control” is absurd.

Equally, the ill-informed demonising of hunting as a brutal spectator sport like bear baiting and bullfighting is only one step away from accusing fans who follow rugby, motor sport or horse racing of doing so in the hope of seeing people and animals hurt. In reality the fox and hounds are generally so far ahead of the riders that it is rare for a hunt follower to see a kill. The entire objective of hunting is the madcap, headlong chase.

But if hunting is banned, a centuries-old balance will disappear, with the unfortunate fox finding its status collapse from the huntsman’s occasional wily quarry, with an excellent chance of escape, to the gamekeeper’s vermin alongside the rat, to be shot and snared, all year long, to as close as possible to extinction.

As a sheep farmer I find claims that farmers routinely kill foxes because they eat lambs absurd. My own experience has been to tend several hundred ewes lambing outdoors for more than 30 years. Inevitably I have lost lambs, but none has definitely been taken live by a fox. In fact foxes are an immense benefit to farmers as they subsist mainly on the rabbits which have been calculated to cost UK agriculture £100 million each year. As for poultry, the majority are indoors while today’s free-range poultry farms are protected by highly effective electric fencing. Besides, very few farmers even own the weaponry to kill foxes.

Hunting with hounds kills around 15,000 foxes each year, far fewer than the number meeting their end on the roads. But there are estimates of up to another 150,000 foxes killed each year in order to preserve game birds — so that they in turn can be killed.

It is important to appreciate that our landscape is divided into an invisible patchwork, largely defined by the historic sporting preferences of the area and its owners for either hunting or shooting. In recent decades hunting has been struggling, not through the antics of the “antis”, but because the traditional open landscape of pastureland, copses and hedges beloved by huntsmen and conservationists alike has been replaced in many areas by creeping urbanisation, intensive arable cropping and our network of lethally overcrowded roads. Collapsing farm incomes have put the cost of hunting beyond the reach of many rural people.

In contrast, the demand for pheasant-shooting by city- dwellers has soared. It has become a hugely popular, commercially important urban “country” sport. Politicians could no more contemplate a ban on shooting than criminalising golf, despite the fact that its objective, unlike either golf or hunting, is a body count.

It has been calculated that an annual 30 million pheasants are reared intensively before being released. Sadly, the traditional and ecologically valuable role of the gamekeeper in also keeping down the magpies, carrion crows, stoats and weasels which prey on the eggs and chicks of wild, ground-nesting birds has become much more focused on cost-effectively wiping out the only real predator of well-grown, artificially reared pheasants: the fox.

A hunting ban would inevitably see a spread of shooting, not only by ex-hunters seeking an alternative pastime, but also by ex-hunting landowners exploiting this neglected source of income. This would leave no more relatively safe “havens” of hunting country for our fox population to escape annihilation. The spread of over-grazing by its main food source, the rabbit, would in turn destroy the habitat of many vulnerable species.

English law is already wildly discriminatory towards our wild creatures. The badger is fanatically preserved under 1992 legislation while our wonderful brown hare is declining in most areas, largely because it is still treated as open-season vermin under 19th-century game laws.

Despite our supposedly rational and ecologically conscious society, the anti-hunting process is so clearly driven by bigotry and sentiment rather than by science and intelligent compassion that the naming of any anti-hunting legislation creates a major dilemma. Any Bill published with a title along the lines of “The Protection of Wild Mammals . . .” will be a lie.

The author’s family have been farmers for 400 years.

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