Fox Hunters Hounded by British Vote to Ban Sport

In a showdown between town and country, the British Parliament on Friday demanded the death sentence for “Tallyho.” Hunting with hounds should be criminalized, the House of Commons voted, 411-151, after debate fraught with passion and history.

The spectacle of red-coated riders and packs of hounds coursing through the winter countryside is likely to survive another year or two, but the vote means that it may not outlast the millennium.

Legislators, most from the ruling Labor Party, had zeroed in on fox hunting, for centuries an English countryside tradition at once cherished and reviled.

“The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable,” said playwright Oscar Wilde back in the days when it was mostly the rich upper class that rode to hounds.

In the last half a century, opponents have tried repeatedly to ban hunting, a pillar of the landed gentry. Once, the main Labor objection was that the sport was elitist. These days, it is animal rights advocates who lobby hardest against the use of dogs to hunt deer, fox, hare and mink.

Despite the vote, the debate is far from over, and it reaches far beyond the countryside and deep into the British ethos.

Both sides invoke the national love for sport and animals, for tradition, fair play, personal freedom and tolerance.

“The prevention of cruelty to wild animals is the main issue,” said 34-year-old legislator Michael Foster, who sponsored the bill calling for an $8,500 fine and up to six months in jail for those who defy the ban. “This historic vote makes it inconceivable that hunting will survive this Parliament.”

Labor came to power last spring with a hunting ban as one of its platform promises. But Friday’s bill was presented by Foster, and not directly by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“Private member’s bills,” as they are called, are not formally supported by government, and many never become law because governments are loath to spend precious debating time on issues outside their own key legislative objectives.

That is why Friday’s vote will not bring about a ban before Blair is ready. He has a mandate to rule until 2002 and may be unwilling to risk the rural wrath that a ban would provoke.

Blair, who is traveling in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and half a dozen other senior ministers were not present for the vote, but the prime minister issued a statement saying the issue is “open to review for the future.”

Animal rights advocates, though, immediately portrayed the vote as an irreversible success.

“I don’t see how the government can be dissuaded from a ban. Before the end of this century, hunting will be in the history books where it belongs,” said Kevin Saunders of the League Against Cruel Sports.

In Britain today, about 215,000 people hunt as part of 214 hunting organizations. Supporters say their sport provides work for about 15,000 people, generates about $275 million and is the heart of the social life in rural England.

Everybody in the countryside is born knowing the old hunting song, “D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far, far away with his hounds and his horn in the morning?”

More than 100,000 pro-hunting demonstrators turned out last July in London’s Hyde Park.

“The whole fabric of country life has been tied up with hunting for generations--everything from the hunt balls to charities to the very look of the countryside. It would be hard to imagine life without it,” said the countess of Radnor one recent frosty morning as Wilton Hunt riders shared a “stirrup cup” of mulled wine before their meet in Wiltshire, in southwestern England. About 70 of the riders, most of them women, rode five hours that day without seeing a fox.

Throughout the country, however, the ban has wide support: 65% backed it in a recent poll, including 57% in rural areas. Cruelty is central to the debate.

Said anti-hunting campaigner Saunders: “We must not tolerate something like 100,000 animals being tortured as a form of entertainment.”

Supporters believe that hunting is an effective and humane way of culling and conservation.

“We conserve by protecting the balance of nature,” said John Gummer, a former environment minister.

Hunting, he said, is “the least cruel method of keeping that balance. All other methods are more cruel and less effective.”

A fox in the wild lives better than a caged farm animal, pointed out Polly Toynbee, a leftist columnist. “A nasty end is better than a nasty lifetime.”

Culling alternatives like poison, snares and shooting all can maim without killing, said author Robin Lane Fox, who has ridden to hounds for 40 years.

“When dead, the fox is eaten by hounds just as you or I tear a dead salmon to pieces or cut up a lamb chop. We are not boiling foxes alive like a good restaurant’s lobsters,” he said.

There is broad agreement that wildlife like deer and foxes need to be culled because they damage forests, crops and livestock. Beyond cruelty, the broader debate is about tolerance and freedom.

“The freedom of the individual to hunt with hounds is no different in principle from the freedom of each individual to, or not to, fish, shoot, eat meat, use tobacco, drink, gamble or worship as he or she chooses,” said Brian Mawhinney, a former chairman of the Conservative Party. “A free society is one which jealously protects the freedoms of its individual citizens.”

Farmers say not one fox would be saved by a ban. The Economist magazine notes that each year in Britain 100,000 foxes are run over, 40,000 are shot, and 17,000 are killed by hounds in hunts.

“Set against the feelings of the minority that believe a hunting ban would be an assault on rural culture and traditions, fox hunting is simply too small an evil to justify wielding the bludgeon of the law,” the magazine says. “Turning hunters into criminals would be an act of intolerance harder to justify than hunting itself.”