How Foxhunting Became So Divisive in the UK

In a 6,800-word article in the January 24 edition of New Yorker magazine, Jane Kramer tries to figure out how fox hunting became so divisive in England. Though a very long piece, and well-writtten, Ms. Kramer paints a muddier picture than necessary. The core story is that fox hunting rose up with the rise of the Enclosure Movement in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Much of the class issues in the UK today derive from this push of people off the land and into the cities at this time. Apparenty teaching animus acorss generations is a practice not restricted to the Middle East and certain African tribes.



Where Ms. Kramer gets it right is in the very important role of the hunt in protecting wildlife habitat, and the very marginal role that fox hunting plays in actually controlling fox numbers.

Hunt volunteers protect the habitat of hundreds of species. They mend fences, maintain the walls and hedges they jump, root out foxes that have gone to ground on local farms, dispose of dead farm animals, tend the covers in which foxes hide or dig their lairs, and, most important, help to manage a fox population that has multiplied so wantonly since the extinction of Britain's wolves (the fox's natural predator), in the seventeenth century, that foxes are now dug into the back yards and public parks of Central London and can be seen daily strolling around the city. On Armistice Day, in November, hundreds of people watched a fox circle the "remembrance" poppies in the gardens of Westminster Abbey while the Queen was leading a silent prayer. A month later, a Guardian photographer recording "a day in the life of 10 Downing Street" snapped pictures of a fox strutting past the Prime Minister's front door, right between visits from the Italian and Azerbaijani Prime Ministers and the arrival of the German Chancellor. ("Four old foxes in one day," a policeman at the corner said.)



Somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand foxes are killed in hunts in England and Wales each year, and hunters maintain that, while this accounts for less than a quarter of the total killed -- most are run over, or shot or trapped or poisoned by farmers, or savaged by farm dogs -- foxhunting is by far the most rational way of culling, or, you could say, the least compromising to the "welfare of the fox."



"The hound goes for the fox, it's natural," Captain Farquhar says. "But the process is selective. It follows the rules of nature. The weak fox and the sick fox get caught, but a vixen, say, either heavy or in milk, doesn't scent, and so she's safe." Most foxes get away. And most people regret it. Even the country's prodigious animal-rights lobby -- which includes, among others, the R.S.P.C.A., the League Against Cruel Sports, and the Political Animal Lobby -- admits that foxes can be serious pests."