Alliance in the hunt for a compromise

Date: 09/10/2003

Hunting has a long tradition in Britain, but MPs have voted to ban it. The UK's upper chamber is resisting this, along with the Countryside Alliance. James Drew finds out why

BOURNEMOUTH. One of the UK's coastal gems, it is normally associated with bracing sea air, genteel elderly folk and strolls along the promenade.

Not so on a recent Sunday, 28 September. Perfectly timed to coincide with the first day of the UK's Labour Party conference, a cavalcade of 80 motorbikes roared along the seafront. The bikers represented the Countryside Alliance (CA), which seeks, according to its website, to "promote the interests of rural people, including all field sports, sensible wildlife management, and wider countryside concerns such as jobs, landscapes and freedoms".

No prizes for guessing the source of the bikers' ire.

Their banners said it all: "59% of the public say keep hunting", referring to an NOP poll conducted in December 2002. While 35% of respondents wanted a ban, 39% said they would prefer regulation and 20% favoured the status quo.

The UK Liberal Democrats' conference was on the receiving end of similarly passionate demonstrations, when pro-hunting demonstrators (and their working dogs) took their message to Brighton.

"A hunting ban. Liberal? Democratic?", as the protestors put it, and their aim was to speak to Westminster MPs about "the illiberal and undemocratic foundations that any ban on hunting would have - and to point out the obvious irony that many consistently vote for a ban despite a professed belief in liberty and democracy".

The bikers must have been taking a day off - but trucks, bearing pro-hunting mega-banners, drove up and down the promenade.

A safe bet, then, that the MPs who supported the criminalization of rural hunting pursuits when the Hunting Bill was put before the vote in the UK's House of Commons on 3 December 2002, are only too aware that passions are running as high as rev counters.

The CA boasts 400,000 full and affiliate members, drawn from the entirety of the UK's rural community.

Its website is keen to stress "an especially strong presence from low-income rural workers and small farmers".

Is this perhaps an attempt, along with the Alliance's national pro-hunting advertising campaign, which depicts a young woman first in hunting gear, and then in a nurse's uniform, to distance the debate from the inflammatory 'them and us' class-struggle syndrome long associated with country pursuits?

Simon Hart, chief executive designate of the Countryside Alliance, and director of its campaign for hunting, told European Voice: "The campaign's thrust is to highlight the fact that much of the opposition to hunting and country pursuits seems to have more to do with a misinformed perception of the sorts of people who take part in field sports, rather than any inbuilt sympathy for the foxes.

"Another recent poll showed that 44% of respondents believed the debate was class-driven, against only 41% who felt that animal welfare was the key motivating factor."

But what of those whose hatred of hunting is based on nothing other than a genuine abhorrence of cruelty to animals?

"The concept of 'cruelty' is a vexed one - obviously very little is known about the thought processes that a fox or other hunted animal experiences during the course of a hunt. It is arguable that the animal's state of mind will be no different from that which it experiences during a 'normal' day - its natural urge to avoid any possible predator," says Hart.

"The CA prefers to define cruelty as the 'infliction of unnecessary suffering', but here again, the definition of what constitutes 'unnecessary' ultimately depends on your viewpoint. There is obviously a degree of suffering in every method of control.

"People are entitled to voice their objections to what other people choose to do, and, for obvious reasons, when one person's liberty brings mental or physical harm to another, as with theft, murder, or rape, civilized society has a duty to make such activities punishable by law.

But should it really be a criminal offence to participate in an activity in which no one is hurt, either physically or mentally, and which infringes no personal liberties?"

The Countryside Alliance is also very keen to stress the jobs generated by country pursuits - a total of 60,000 people are directly employed in the UK as a result, they say.

Of these, some 5,000 are full-time gamekeepers, whose livelihoods depend on the rearing and management of game for shooting.

Around 2,200 people are employed on fish farms, while 835 work in hunt kennels. A further 27,000 are employed by trades related to hunting, shooting and fishing.

As the Countryside Alliance puts it: "A ban would make a considerable difference in rural communities scattered throughout the UK, not only on rural trades and businesses that have flourished as a result of the country pursuit, but on the vast number of rural people who benefit from related part-time jobs.

"Beaters who work for shoots, hedge layers and fence builders who work for local hunts, and catering firms who provide refreshments for angling competitions and hunt functions would also suffer."

The environment would also suffer, says the CA. It argues that conservation of sporting and wildlife habitats and landscape features is paid for directly and voluntarily by large numbers of landowners, tenants, farmers, sporting participants and supporters, and by government.

Estimates for the costs incurred in areas used for countryside sports exceed €300 million annually.

This covers the expenditure involved in managing river corridors and wetlands, in coppicing and maintaining woodland, maintaining hedges and in the management of moorlands and heaths, as well asrough grasslands.

International sport would be a loser as well, say supporters, claiming that the death of such activities would mean the loss of skills and talents that "could never be replaced".

In fairness, the UK's shooting and equestrian sportsmen and women rarely come back from international competitions without a medal - and many individuals, for example the four-time world coarse fishing champion Bob Nudd, have rural pastimes to thank for the honing of their talents.

The Countryside Alliance can at least take heart from the fact that anti-hunting MPs have not had it all their own way in the UK's parliament - a stormy eight-hour debate in September, when the bill received a second reading in the second chamber, the House of Lords, saw the bill described as "ignorant, obstinate and destructive" by the Bishop of Hereford, the Reverend John Oliver.

Meanwhile, Countryside Alliance President Lady Mallalieu said: "Prejudice not principle, bigotry not evidence, has been allowed to prevail."

That Mallalieu is a Labour peer is a good sign that, as far as this impassioned debate is concerned, party loyalties come a poor second to beliefs, on both sides of the house, with only 11 of the 59 speakers voicing support for the bill.

It now awaits its committee stage - but, in the face of frank opposition, anti-hunting peers may have to decide to restore a measure originally present in the bill, which offered the chance of a compromise by allowing hunting under licence.

Running with the hare and hunting with the hounds? Ironically, in the face of a determined Countryside Alliance campaign that seems to be catching ever-more 'undecideds' in its net, this may yet prove to be the Blair government's only hope of pushing any legislation on the issue through at all.

Hunting has a long tradition in Britain, but MPs have voted to ban it. The UK's upper chamber is resisting this, along with the Countryside Alliance.