Close loopholes in the Hunting Act and end this barbarity - Yorkshire Post letters

From: Miss K Watson, Briarlands Close, Bramhall, Stockport.
Do you agree with this reader when it comes to the hunting of animals such as foxes? Photo: Brian Lawless/PA WireDo you agree with this reader when it comes to the hunting of animals such as foxes? Photo: Brian Lawless/PA Wire
Do you agree with this reader when it comes to the hunting of animals such as foxes? Photo: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

When THE League Against Cruel Sports received 184 requests of suspected illegal hunting activities between late October and Boxing Day, can we be complacent about the Hunting Act as it stands?

A number of incidents in the first six weeks of the season occurred in Yorkshire.

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A group maintaining hunt activity has recorded eyewitness accounts of one hunt closely harassing two deer at once, obstructing a road on their way to a club hunt, and also trespassing on a heritage site and allowing hounds to go at another deer.

Later in the season this hunt allowed hounds to savage a rescued bittern to death and also ran a fox to ground on New Year’s Day.

On New Year’s Eve, hounds of another hunt killed a fox.

They forced it to run for its life for 25 minutes – hounds can harass a terrified fox for much longer – and on the previous day it appears that Barlow terriers blocked a badger sett.

This is self-evidently not “accidental hunting”.

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The “experts” in the tradition, in the last 80 years, have admitted that “pain and suffering” are inevitable, that hounds should be savage with their fox”, that terriers get a sadistic pleasure from tormenting foxes and that controlled fox hunting is neither “efficient” nor “economic”.

If such barbarity is still going on, the loopholes in the Act must be closed, as the great majority of the public and their elected MPs require.

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