Land of the Free

Warenton, Virginia Fox hounds and riders.


The piece below has been vandalized by the title writer. "Tally Ho Dude?" No one outside of the California surfer community, circa 1990, uses terms like "dude". That said, and with one other small caveat, it is a nice piece.

The other caveat has to do with the power of the animal rights movement in the U.S. The notion that the Humane Society of the the U.S. or PETA could put a stop to hunting of any kind is laughable.

Virginia has an expressed constitutional right to hunt, spends money encouraging more people to hunt, and keeps expanding the hunt season (and the limits) for deer and many other species.

PETA may be headquartered in Virginia, but those over-reaching gas bags don't make a peep in this state. They may be able to push around Kentucky Fried Chicken, but ESPN runs hunting shows every day, every magazine rack in American has hook-and-bullet publications on it, and the conservation community values hunters and anglers above all others.

In the state of Virginia we shoot well over 200,000 deer a year, and more than a 1,000 bear. Last year trappers took 35,000 red and gray fox and another 85,000 raccoon, and the population of everyything is on the rise. In fact nuisance widlife is such an issue in most of the U.S. that it is now illegal to move a beaver -- you are required to kill it rather than move it in most states. In Virginia the state pays a bounty in oder to encourage people to kill coyote (numbers are on the rise anyway), and there is talk of requiring hunters to shoot a doe in order to be able to be get a permit to shoot a buck; a kind of population-control-through-hunting that was unimaginable only 40 years ago.

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Sunday Times of London, December 26, 2004

Tally ho, dude! The hunt rides to America
by : Jonathan Green

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A foxhunters' exodus is under way from Britain to the land of the free
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Tomorrow morning Dennis Downing, splendid in his scarlet coat, will be up early to oversee the hounds -particularly his old favourites Gossip and Gorgeous. About 70 people will join the meet, including his wife Sue and 19-year-old daughter Emma, and a further 30 will come to see off the hunt, armed with the customary offering of port.

The Boxing Day meet, the biggest on the hunt calendar, is being held a day late as it has fallen on a Sunday, but otherwise everything will be done in accordance with the hunt's long tradition, which stretches back to 1888.

It could be the scene in any British village. The difference is that Downing left England in 1998 and now works for the Blue Ridge hunt in Virginia, 50 miles west of Washington DC.

Instead of the patchwork of Worcestershire fields he surveyed as master of the Croome hunt, he now rides through the spectacular Shenandoah valley with the Blue Ridge mountains in the background. His companions will be airline pilots, lawyers and doctors rather than the working farmers in England he once hunted with.

The decision by the government to ban hunting with dogs -which was set to come into force on February 18 -means that Downing, 50, has made a move that many of those who rely on hunting for a living are considering emulating. There still may be a temporary reprieve -the announcement last week that the attorney-general will not fight any application for an injunction against the ban from the Countryside Alliance means that hunting is likely to continue for several months yet.

But the uncertainty means Ireland, other European countries and America are becoming increasingly attractive as a new home for huntsmen and women. First choice for many is America, because the two communities have long hunted with each other.

When an advertisement for a whipper-in at the Blue Ridge hunt was placed in Horse & Hound recently, the hunt received 44 applications. Of those, two were from Americans, five from Ireland and the other 37 from British hunt staff.

"When we advertised a similar post four years ago we only got two people applying from England," says Linda Armbrust, the master of the Blue Ridge hunt. "It's incredible."

So Downing, it seems, was merely ahead of the pack when his family left Britain.

The strain caused by his job had become too much: the taunts Emma, then 12, endured; the ostracism Downing experienced; the industrial developments that made it increasingly difficult to keep hounds off building sites, busy roads and railway tracks.

"I thought, 'Stuff this'," says Downing and he started to scour job advertisements. In May 1998 the family --including foxhounds Glider (since deceased), Gossip and Gorgeous -- packed up and moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where Downing had been appointed master of foxhounds.

"Suddenly we were somewhere where you could ride hard for 25 miles and not see a single car," says Downing. "And our standard of living shot up -for the first time in my life I lived in a centrally heated house. It was difficult being in the Deep South -- at first no one could understand what I said and I couldn't understand them but the people were so warm and welcoming." They moved to the Virginia hunt a couple of years later.

Indeed, foxhunting has a long and rich history in America. Foxhounds were first imported in 1650 by British colonists and the first organised hunt was held in 1747 by Lord Fairfax, an English landowner, who introduced George Washington to the joys of hunting.

Currently there are foxhound hunts in 35 states -hunting over vastly different terrains and for different quarries. In the pinewoods of Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee they hunt red and grey foxes and coyotes. In New England the deciduous growth is good cover for the red fox, as is the landscape in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware. On the Great Plains of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountains in California, coyotes are the main quarry.

However, there is one very distinct difference between the American and English form of hunting. American hunts will chase a fox but not kill it when it goes to ground. "We don't have the same problems with foxes as you do in the UK so they are not vermin here," says Joseph T Murtagh, of the Rose Tree Fox Hunting Club in Brogue, Pennsylvania, the oldest hunt in America. "We chase them and when they go to ground we account for them and they live to fight another day. In fact, I don't think our hounds even know how to kill a fox."

The one thing that Downing does miss is the atmosphere he remembers surrounding a British hunt, despite the protesters. "It used to be exceptional. I remember 1997, my last Boxing Day in England. When we met in the centre of Pershore in Worcestershire we were surrounded by hundreds of people cheering us, lining the streets. You'd also get loads of people following the hunt in their cars. That's just not something that happens in the United States."

It was that atmosphere that had attracted Armbrust to leave America in 1980 and act as master of two British hunts -the Mendip Farmers and then the High Peak Harriers. "Here in the US if you are arranging a meet you just call everyone up on the phone," she says. "In England I would drive around from farm to farm, talk to them and get to know them -their children, who'd died, who'd got married. I really enjoyed it.

"For people in England hunting is a way of life -it's very different to that in America. I had friends in England that once the cubbing season started their whole social life revolved around it. Here in the US if you are hunting you might go shopping in the morning, then perhaps go hunting for three to four hours and then go off for a game of tennis or golf afterwards."

Armbrust spent more than a decade happily here but increasingly she felt public opinion was turning against hunting. "When John Major won in 1992 I went out to buy a second-hand horse lorry to celebrate because I knew hunting would be around for at least another five years," she recalls. "But by 1995 I realised that it was not going to survive much longer."

She decided to go back to the US, partly for personal reasons but also because she was weary of the protests. "It wasn't fun being in boots and breeches and having people spit on you at the local garage while calling you 'fox killer'. And it wasn't fun either having 50 or 60 people in black balaclavas using filthy language in front of your children. But you know what we say in the US? 'What the hell!'"

So she returned to Virginia in 1995.

She and other members of the American foxhunting set are concerned that the British move could encourage similar calls in the US, led by the Humane Society of the United States. "The entire animal rights movement in the United States reacted with unfettered glee at the ban in England," says Wayne Pacelle, its chief executive. "We view this act of parliament as one of the most important actions in the history of the animal rights movement. This will energise our efforts to stop hunting with hounds."

"I am sickened and disgusted by what they have done in the UK," retorts Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis Foster, executive director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America, which represents 20,000 huntsmen and women. "England is the mecca of foxhunting. It's your heritage and was exported over here. If this happened in America, I and many like me would go to war against a government that does not represent all its citizens."

Plans are already in place to ensure that the bonds between American and British hunting remain, and that British huntsmen and women do not have to put away their scarlet coats. For three years Carla Hawkinson, master of foxhounds at the Tennessee Valley hunt, has been running Goneaway Tours. It is a specialist hunting travel agency, taking American hunters to England to fulfil an ambition and vice-versa.

"I hate to say it but I think business is going to pick up for us bringing English hunters to the US," she says. Her next big excursion is to take a group of 10 American hunters to Exmoor, Dartmoor and Wiltshire in mid-February. "Hunting is integral to the lifestyle loved by country people of all classes and occupations.

We are prepared to return to the homeland of hunting and to stand up for the rights of all hunters. If hunting dies in Great Britain, we have more to fear than the law."

Downing thinks more will choose to visit America to hunt and predicts an exodus of hunt staff from Britain. "My hunt friends are calling all the time about jobs over here," he says. "But there are only so many jobs to go round."

Downing and his family have no desire to go back -they hope to get American citizenship soon and trips to England are becoming rare. When he rides out tomorrow there will be nothing but satisfaction.

"I've never once regretted what we did -- even when we go back to England on visits," says Downing. "In fact, each time we go there and see how the country has changed, I feel less and less like going back."

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