Crazy like a fox

It’s a wind-swept morning, a steel grey sky masks the best efforts of the rising sun. It’s warmth, hidden and unknown.

The sound of the wind and drifting sheets of fine rain are intermittently broken by the distant howl of hounds and the shuddering thunder of hooves driven hard into the soft earth.

Emerging from the clearing mists, men and woman alike in crisp red jackets, sat bolt upright on horseback ride with a sea of dogs chasing exuberantly but with chilling purpose about their feet. They pursue their quarry with determined strides, ever closer with each footfall and each sudden, shrill burst of the hunt horn.

In front of them, their tired and terrified prey is chased and harried for miles. For all of its guile and wisdom of the land, it’s end draws nearer.

Finally, through exhaustion and sheer, soul-destroying fatigue, she can run no more. Death seems like a fair trade for eternal sleep. Maybe death will come quickly in the jaws of a hounds single, sudden bite and the blackness will consume all the sooner.

If only.

What year is this? Two-thousand and five. Not the seventeenth or the eighteenth century. This is our time, right now.

Apparently, this is a humane way to ‘cull’ and naturally manage a troublesome pest of the fields. Besides, it’s tradition, and tradition is like stone: immovable and stoic.

Grown, mature, [seemingly] educated people chasing up and down fields, hills and valleys, vaulting hedgerows and slashing through narrow, cold streams of melt water from the hills above, in pursuit of a small, feral, predatory canine that has somehow been labeled as a pest and a nuisance to wildlife, farm stock and anything else these people choose to prize and respect more than animals less productive.

These people are, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the leading reasons why I’m sometimes ashamed to be English. Let’s put this in perspective: they kill defenseless animals for pleasure.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? What is it in their nature that compels them to contrive such a worrying, frankly pathetic reason to just kill?

The fox is no more a threat to the wildlife than a brass door handle. They do not need culling. That happens often enough when the poor bastards wander onto arterial roads leading out of the countryside and into towns and get swatted by motorists.

Yet these people banded together and created scenes of chaos and violence outside the Houses of Parliament in their feeble and vile attempt to stop a nationwide ban on fox hunting being made into legislation.

How on earth do you justify killing an animal for no other reason than a so-called ‘sport’ that is nothing more than legalized blood lust?

Easy, you give yourself an obfuscating and softly-softly title like ‘The Countryside Alliance’ to confuse the great unwashed electorate into thinking they are the moral and ethical caretakers of our green and pleasant land and that we should all defer to their better knowledge because they know best.

What utter and unadulterated bollocks.

In desperation, they throw up a miasma of fear, uncertainty and doubt by fawning to the media and feigning impending death at the hands of the heartless politicians conspiring to wipe out their livelihood.

Apparently, if fox hunting is banned, jobs will be lost, thousands of hunt hounds will have to be destroyed -- that one cleverly and may I say, cynically constructed to slap the likes of the RSPCA and the Animal Liberation Front with some bitter-sweet irony -- because an entire industry will have been destroyed.

Really?

Isn’t that like the Third Reich complaining to the Allied forces that closing down the extermination camps would mean mass unemployment amongst their soldiering employees?

These hunters are worse than any animal. They are filth and they dishonor every one of us every time they mount their horses, charge their hounds and form a hunt to kill yet another animal.

But the landscape has changed about their feet. People are polarized by the images of savagery and wanton violence. And we the people want an end to this despicable act.

The law has now changed and the hunter has now become the hunted...