The game fair season got off to a slightly confusing start in 2016.
Following the Country Land and Business Association’s decision not to run the CLA Game Fair this year, other organisers stepped in with their events at various locations, each vying for the title of this year’s official ‘Game Fair’. The simple fact was that not all could succeed. With the uncertainty as to which would ultimately survive, the participating organisations that normally book a sizeable amount of space, such as the Countryside Alliance and Game & Wildlife Conservancy Trust, had to ‘test the waters’ with smaller displays.
The Game Fair at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire was in a more conventional mould, including the whole range of field sports, as well as carrying on the tradition of organising debates on rural topics. Despite the Hunting Act being in force for over 11 years, the organisers know that this is still a contentious issue and a debate was arranged.
Those opposed to hunting and shooting are probably in the minority at any game fair, so inviting speakers to put their case can be a little tricky. Such events are considered ‘bloodfests’, as a previous anti-hunt guest once described his visit. Nevertheless, the two speakers who did accept the challenge to put their case at Ragley Hall deserve credit for doing so.
Chairman Robin Hicks, former chief executive of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, asked for a vote on repealing the Hunting Act at the very start and one chap at the back put his hand up – a clear indication of where the audience stood. I was pleased to be asked to take part, as was Dr Lewis Thomas, secretary of the Veterinary Association for Wildlife Management, who has considerable knowledge and experience of animals and their welfare. Our opponents were Robbie Marsland, the League Against Cruel Sports director for Scotland, and long-time hunt saboteur and founder of ‘Hounds Off’, Joe Hashman.
I get on reasonably well with Robbie Marsland, having debated with him on a number of occasions, but an account of the debate written by him for the online newspaper the Huffington Post gave what might be termed as a ‘well-spun’ version, exploiting the fact that it would be highly unlikely any reader would have been present at the debate to know otherwise. Describing the points and questions put by myself and Dr Thomas as “old, tired and sometimes irrelevant arguments”, was disingenuous to say the least. Mr Marsland would not be addressing them and instead would be concentrating on the “political reality” of a law that came into force almost 12 years ago.
Now that really is ducking some very important questions that may well be old and tired, but are continually asked simply because we never hear anything like adequate answers. What, for example, is the anti-hunter’s view of wildlife management? What precise methods of control are advocated? What is inherently wrong about using dogs in wildlife management? Even a question from the audience along the same lines brought a very reluctant suggestion from the LACS’ Robbie Marsland that only if a particular fox was causing problems might it be shot – a view that was almost immediately contradicted by Joe Hashman in saying that such shooting upsets and disrupts fox family units. It would seem that death in other circumstances, whether natural or not, does not do the same.
Odd, that in saying that we should we should all move on, the anti-hunt campaigners conveniently ignore the vast amount of time (some 700 parliamentary hours) and money (around £30 million) spent in putting the nonsensical Hunting Act onto the statute book. In the same breath they argue that there are far more important issues for the government to deal with, but brazenly demand time to be found for this law to be strengthened.
There will be some who say that any game fair audience is bound to be overwhelmingly pro-hunting and that may well be true, but there was a neat little test of the public’s supposed anti-hunting feelings the following weekend.
The BBC’s Countryfile programme has come in for a fair degree of criticism for portraying the countryside in rather rosy terms and sometimes avoiding issues that are deemed unpalatable for the wider urbanised audience. Understandably some countryside organisations were sceptical about appearing at the Countryfile Live show held at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. The Countryside Alliance, along with most of the main rural/field sports organisations, took the plunge and booked stands…and it seems to have been a good decision for more than one reason.
Countryfile Live certainly attracted a different audience to that which normally goes to game fairs, (even the opening hour of 9.30 was nothing like the 6.30 start for most country shows), but where it probably surprised many is in how that audience reacted to the exhibits, stands and views on show. For all the talk about 80% of the public opposing hunting with hounds, it appears that the “wider urbanised audience” of the BBC’s Countryfile does not quite see it that way. There was no hiding the pro-hunting, shooting or fishing campaign posters or literature on the Countryside Alliance stand. Hounds of the Christ Church and Farley Hill Beagles were present attracting crowds of children and their parents. No words of disapproval, no recoiling in disgust, just a fascination for these animals and what they are bred to do. In that sense, Countryfile Live provided an important link between two audiences and showed that perhaps they are not so different.
The staff and volunteers on the CA stand were constantly busy and will verify that throughout the four day show only one negative comment was heard, which begs the question where are all these anti-hunting people? Surely, if 80% of the population is opposed to hunting with hounds, wouldn’t some have attended Countryfile Live?
Or maybe, as is so often the case with many campaigns that rely on fooling the public and politicians, the reality is sometimes very different.
I know Joe Hashman from the days he attended the South Dorset Hunt. The guy’s a complete figment of the imagination and would often entertain us in the Western Gazette with tales of heroic foxes holding off a dozen hounds and to be quite frank, having not heard of him for quite a while, I thought perhaps he may have joined the circus or become a comedian.
The basic problem for any group asking for the Hunting Act to be altered is that the Hunting Act is not actually a product of our proper parliamentary process. Rather it is the originally submitted bill in all its illogical and confusingly bad original state rammed through by the Parliament Act.
Admitting that the Act needs amendment is admitting that it is faulty, and that the legislation as drafted was done badly (which it was). As this was claimed at the time to be EXACTLY what the anti-hunting people wanted, to amend it is to admit that actually they didn’t know what they were doing when they drafted the law.
Furthermore, amending the Act can go either way. Repealing it entirely and drafting a general wildlife anti-cruelty law would be a fairer way to go, but this would then open up a very different can of worms, as any such law would replace not only the Hunting Act but other piecemeal legislation like the Badgers Act, and as any anti-cruelty law has to be fair and reflect economic damage done by pest species (as the laws surrounding rodenticides already do) as compared to any inhumane aspect, the situation then gets worse and worse for anti-hunting activists.
At this point, the Hunting Act would be gone, and all control measures would have to be humane for any given pest. Given the huge zoonotic disease potential of having a huge badger population that is wholly susceptible to zoonotic tuberculosis, country-wide badger population control would be rapidly deployed (and not just in the bTB hot zones). Similarly fox hunts could go back to population control of foxes, with provisos such as no more bolting of animals that had been chased to earth, instead humane killing once dug to if needed.
Anyway, this is the dilemma of the anti-hunting activists. At present they have a badly-worded, mostly unenforcible law, but if they manage to force a government to look at impartially, a much bigger can of worms is opened and their irrational prejudices get mostly steamrollered by common sense.
“Admitting that the Act needs amendment is admitting that it is faulty, ” that was the key consideration driving Joe Duckworth’s ‘review’ of the Hunting Act.
The law draws a rather odd line between legal and illegal actions – it’s illegal not to shoot a herd of flushed deer and illegal not to. LACS believe that shooting herds of flushed deer fleeing hounds is cruel. They know full well that the law enables stag hunting to continue – something they are deeply against, however political considerations – namely an inability to admit the law is flawed force them to support the very hunting they oppose and indeed to oppose people using an alternative to shooting flushed deer – namely not shooting them.
No one in the anti hunting fraternity actually thinks the Hunting Act is a good law but they cannot admit it due to their intrinsic dishonesty.
Thanks Jim for clearing the muddied waters over the Game Fair(s). I ended up not going to a Game Fair at all having been every year for the past thirty or more years.There was certainly much confusion over what to expect and having looked at the list of exhibiters at each I became firmly of the opinion that a bit more thought and co operation needed to be employed, after all it is perfectly obvious that three or four game fairs are not going to offer anything like what we have come to expect from THE Game Fair.
I hope to be attending the Game Fair at Hatfield House next year.
keep up the good work.
Mac Singleton
It is interesting to note that when Countryfile transmitted its programme on BBC1, reporting on their fair (Countryfile Live) there was no mention of hunting at all.
Reading Mike Fry`s reference to Hashman made me wince. I`ve just been duelling with the latter in the Blackmore Vale Magazine (our local freebie) where he had made some scandalous accusations about foxhound management and welfare. I replied in some detail to his original letter and he came back with what he thought were arguments that trumped my attempt to quote facts; and he offered a website as research evidence to support his case. What he failed to mention was that the website is in fact an anti-hunting propaganda sheet and the `statistics` he quoted about the euthanasia of foxhounds at an early age were based on remarks attributed to Lord Henry Bentinck in the 19th century. When asked the secret of his success as a hound breeder, he said `I breed a lot..and hang a lot` As I pointed out in my response, we hanged people for sheep stealing at that time but it does not relate to modern day practice. The editor has ruled the correspondence closed now on this matter!
Thank you for those comments, John. I remember using the hound killing argument when at the LACS. Yet when at a particular hunt kennels a few years back, I saw some very old hounds just pottering around. The Huntsman told me that they had given their best years to him hunting, so he was letting them live out their last years just doing what they wanted. Of course there will come a day when they will be put down, but that comes to all dogs. I know the argument that they will be shot is often used to shock the public, but compare that to the sometimes unsettling process of taking an elderly dog to a vet, with all the strange smells, the shaving of a leg and then finding a vein to inject. I’m not criticising this process (having had to go through it numerous times and hating every second of it) but let’s be realistic and not pretend that most hunts do not care about their hounds simply to make a point.
karma never has a deadline