ON THE first day of the hunting ban 250 hunts rode out into the wintry sun and killed no fewer than 91 foxes. It looked very much like business as usual, apart from some huntsmen dragging effigies of Tony Blair for their hounds to pursue.

Clare Rowson, West Midlands spokeswoman for the Countryside Alliance, said there was little discernible difference between hunting yesterday and on Thursday, the day before the new law took hold. The alliance said that most of the foxes were shot, although three were “accidentally” killed by hounds.

“It looks the same, it smells the same. As a hunting person I couldn’t really tell much difference,” Rowson said.

“The main difference is the sense of commitment to overturn the temporary ban and get back people’s freedom and livelihood that have been taken away from them.”

Among those who threw down the gauntlet to the government was Otis Ferry, huntsman son of the rock singer Bryan Ferry, whose hunt, the South Shropshire, also shot a fox after it was dug from a hole.

Ferry, the joint master who was one of those accused of disorderly conduct after an invasion of the House of Commons last year, then stood just feet away as the animal was torn apart by up to 50 hounds.

However, if police are asked to investigate by animal activists monitoring the hunt they face a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Gallop.

Did Ferry, 22, sitting astride his horse blowing his hunting horn, and his hunt chase the animal to ground across open fields in the shadow of Shropshire’s Long Mynd landmark, as witnesses suggested? Or did the hunt just happen to be riding by as a terrier man was digging down 4ft to reach the fox? Edward Foster, the hunt’s other joint master, insisted that it was a completely legal “kill”.

For all the ballyhoo about banning hunting, it was tally-ho as normal across much of England and Wales. About 1,000 people followed Ferry and the 200-strong South Shropshire hunt on foot.

There was frost in the fields but fire in the rhetoric. The sadness of the last legal day of hunting 48 hours earlier was replaced with an open air of defiance.

None of the hunts, of course, was deliberately hunting foxes with packs of hounds. No, this was, they insisted, a massive exercising of hounds.

Members of the South Durham hunt legally killed a fox — it was shot three times — in the heart of Blair’s Sedgefield constituency before gathering with horses and hounds. Police in three vans using CCTV equipment monitored what was happening.

Twenty police kept watch on a “superhunt” involving five packs of hounds and beagles at Postbridge, high on Dartmoor, Devon. An effigy of Blair dangled on a rope on a nearby tree.

Elsewhere the police, supposedly hot in pursuit, were bogged down in confusion.

Alastair McWhirter, Suffolk’s chief constable and rural affairs spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, emphasised that the new act gave police powers to arrest an entire hunt, although it was more likely that “symbolic leaders” would be held.

In other forces, police complained that they had been given no specific instructions on what to do and said that the overriding priority was to maintain public order by defusing confrontations.

Mike Hobday, from the League Against Cruel Sports, said “extremely suspicious activities” were taking place yesterday. The league fielded 100 “monitors” to report suspected breaches of the law and said it was expecting “a small number of prosecutions” to follow. It said there were allegations of illegal activity at fox and hare hunts in the southeast, southwest, West Midlands and the northwest.

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