Britain Moves to Ban Fox Hunt, but Don’t Call Off Hounds Yet

This fox-and-hound story has legs.

After years of wrangling over an issue that pits city-dwelling “townies” against rural traditionalists, a bill to ban fox hunting in Britain overwhelmingly passed the House of Commons late Wednesday.

To the animal rights activist, it was a moral victory. To the avid hunter in herringbone tweeds and Horse and Hound magazine badges, the vote was not about little furry animals but about liberty, democracy and a rural way of life that urban dwellers cannot possibly understand.

And because of that, Wednesday’s vote won’t be the end of it.

The bill is likely to bog down in the more hunting-friendly, aristocratic House of Lords, and the campaigning Labor government is unlikely to press the issue ahead of a general election expected in the spring. If the bill doesn’t make it through both houses before the election, it will have to be reintroduced in the next Parliament.

This may be one reason Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has said he supports a ban, scampered out of town before the hunting debate even began. He said he just had to be in Belfast on Wednesday to see to the Northern Ireland peace process that has been stagnant for months, but few bought that sly excuse.

“Foxy Mr. Blair Goes to Ground,” said the headline in the Evening Standard newspaper Wednesday afternoon.

Hunters and animal rights activists, meanwhile, stood their ground outside Parliament, making separate cases for civil liberties versus animal rights. Claiming to be equally committed to animals, the two sides had about as much in common as a fox and hound.

“This is a stand against the erosion of long-held rights,” said Sue Holmes, 46, a London homemaker whose roots in rural Oxfordshire date back to 700. “I’ve never protested about anything in my life before. But you can’t just endlessly sit back in your warm home looking at the television and say, ‘Oh God, how awful.’ . . . This is about preserving things the way they are.”

The well-dressed Holmes seemed to recognize that she wasn’t the best person to contest the common perception that hunting is a pastime of aristocratic “toffs.” She pointed to a group of “hunt servants” singing the hunting song “D’Ye Ken John Peel” who would lose their jobs if the ban is implemented.

Nearby, management consultant Simon Butler, 58, of Andover, Hampshire, argued that “this is about minorities being able to do what they wish without hindrance. The government gets its support from the majority who live in an urban environment.”

Advocates say that fox hunters are sportsmen engaged in a humane form of animal control, culling the foxes that kill chickens, sheep and other livestock. The foxes, they add, are killed quickly by hounds.

But to animal rights activists, fox hunters are the killers, whoever delivers the coup de grace.

“Fox hunting is cruel, animals are made to suffer, and it doesn’t belong in the 21st century,” said Charlotte Smith, 28, an unemployed bartender on the animal rights side of the barricade. “They like the thrill. It gets them going. They like the power.

“And they say they should do it because their ancestors did it. Well, their ancestors owned slaves and didn’t allow women to vote. That’s no argument for keeping things the same.”

Smith wasn’t swayed by the hunters’ contention that a ban will drive thousands of rural laborers out of work. “What about the miners and factory workers who have lost their jobs?” she said. “People change careers.”

Holly Alum, 73, of Harrich, Essex, held up a sign saying “Hunting is Savagery.” A regular protester, Alum said, “This should have been banned years ago.”

Opponents have been trying for years, but there is strong opposition from the countryside. Thousands of hunters demonstrated around Britain on Wednesday as the Commons considered three options: self-regulation, compulsory licensing of hunts and a near-complete ban.

The first two options were defeated, and the ban won handily, 387 to 174. It outlaws the use of hounds to hunt foxes in sport but doesn’t prevent farmers from shooting foxes to protect their animals.

Labor legislator Michael Foster made the case for the ban, saying, “When a wild animal is being chased to death--is that something we can compromise on?”

Conservative lawmaker Michael Howard countered that “foxes are not cuddly creatures. They are killers, as anyone who keeps sheep or calves or pigs or hens knows. They don’t just kill the one they want to eat, they kill all of them.”

He added that “it beggars belief that any serious government faced with an explosion of violent crime would even contemplate distracting the police from tackling that problem by imposing on them these large, uncertain and impractical burdens” of a prohibition on hunting.