20/03/2022
A must read!
This article by Ed Swales has been published in Hounds Magazine this week.
Hunting Kind
What happened to the 400,000 rural voters who marched in London back in 2002 and the countless thousands, including me, who weren’t able to be there, when the threat to our way of life was under extreme threat?
They retreated to the shires, comforted by the promise that all was in hand and would be taken care of. March on 20 years and the mission to eradicate our way of life throughout England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland is well into the 11th hour, with the clock ticking steadily away, with no clear mitigation plan in place. We are in crisis mode.
Reading recent editions of this superb Hounds magazine, the mandate for change and action is clear, in the various letters and articles.
If you want to know what ‘Hunting Kind’ is all about, why it happened and what you can do, can I invite you to take the time to please read on?
In England, we face an existential threat from the Labour Party to further strengthen the Hunting Act 2004 and ban trail hunting. In Wales, Senedd Cymru are seriously compromising rural communities and their activities such as shooting and hunting, with a banning of both activities on NRW land.
In Scotland, The SNP/Green Alliance reached a conclusion in late February 2002, on its consultation to reduce numbers of hounds to 2, whilst completely ignoring the findings of the review they commissioned by Lord Bonomy.
Northern Ireland, however, has led the way recently with MLAs in Stormont voting in December 2021 to reject a bill to outlaw all forms of hunting with dogs and further, to ban the possibility of trail hunting. Northern Irish politicians were sensible and strong enough to reject prejudice and ill- informed animal rights agendas and to see through the smokescreen of class hatred. Whilst no doubt repeated attempts will be made by the Alliance Party (who purportedly stand for cross community rights) to persecute the rural minority there, people from all over Ireland are reacting by standing up and standing together to say ‘enough is enough’. Rural Irish folk who participate in hunting with scent hounds, sight hounds, terriers, gun dogs, who shoot and fish, who farm or are connected to the agricultural sector or are simply libertarian in mind and champion the right of people in a free democracy, to live their lives the way they choose, or are academics in the fields of wildlife management, conservation and anthropology are now standing up to the plate and showing their politicians where the votes are. We should follow their lead.
After 12 years in the British Army, I spent the next 20 years as a security consultant, working abroad in some of the world’s troubled areas, focussing on emergency response, crisis and risk management and business continuity.
I have also been a lifelong participant in fox hunting and have also enjoyed keeping lurchers bred in the coal fields of Northumberland, ferrets and terriers. I enjoy the odd day shooting when people are kind enough to invite me and have stalked deer, as well as wet a fly on the odd occasion on some fine salmon rivers.
A strange combination, one might think and yet I feel one that perfectly qualifies me to comment thus. That from the leaked Hunting Office zoom call around 18 months ago, through the ban of trail hunting licenses, the conviction of a Director of the MFHA, via the National Trust banning trail hunting, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) and (Kept Animals) bills currently in play, through the NI Bill and now the Scottish Parliament’s proposal, this is a disaster. I have witnessed an ‘event’ become an ‘incident’, developing into an ‘emerging crisis’ and now into full blown ‘crisis’ mode. If you were ever to think that ‘we are in safe hands’ and that ‘all has been taken care of’, then I must ask you to see this scenario for what it is.
Essentially our PR has been lamentably poor and our political lobbying half- hearted and ineffective. The long-held suspicion amongst hunting folk that hunting is only defended or represented from a shooting perspective is a failed strategy. Quite clearly, if hunting goes to the wall, shooting will follow and then the central threads of the fabric of rural life will unravel and the rural tapestry will fall apart .
Hunting needs now to be represented from a hunting perspective and if that means that those of us who hunt with whichever type of dog, group together loosely but with the same ultimate political goal, then we mirror the concept of shooting’s ‘Aim to Sustain’. Let us hope that these plans start to take shape in the coming months and gain our full support.
I spent many hours consulting with such hunting and conservation stalwarts as Frank Houghton-Brown, Claire Bellamy, Rob Williams, Anna Ernsting from This is Hunting UK, the late James Barclay (RIP), Sir Mark Prescott, Jim Barrington, Kevin Owens, Sir Johnny Scott, Charlie Pye-Smith, Lord Mancroft, Louisa Cheape from the Veterinary Association of Wildlife Management. Such legal experts as Daniel Greenberg and Bertie Woodcock QC, the former who drafted the Hunting Act 2004 as Parliamentary Counsel and the latter who defended various hunting prosecutions. And a growing host of rural folk the length and breadth of these isles, who are too numerous to mention by name. They are all the ‘Hunting Kind’.
I also realised that the further I climbed the conversational ladder towards what should have been the control room of this crisis, instead I found myself on a flat-topped pyramid where the silence of inactivity was deafening. The thought crossed my mind that in fact, the anti-hunt lobby who hate us only slightly more than they hate themselves, had won.
Because it looked like we had lost direction and more worryingly, hope. I realised that everyone had been paralysed and that actually, nothing was ever going to happen. Our way of life would end without a proper fight. I found this unacceptable, when the thought that hunting’s demise could be ‘on our watch’.
I decided to act and do something.
Realising that Northern Ireland was ‘vital ground’, armed with my laptop and a notebook, I pointed my car towards Stranraer and sailed across to Northern Ireland and started talking to politicians, farming and hunting organisations and everyone in between. Hope had not yet been crushed in Northern Ireland and they got together and fought hard.
Encouraged by the subsequent success we achieved in Northern Ireland and seeing that it was possible in today’s politics, I went forward with ‘Hunting Kind’, with Westminster in sight, inspired by Baroness Mallalieu’s hair raising speech at that rally, all those years ago….
“Hunting is our music, it is our poetry, it is our art, it is our pleasure. It is where many of our best friendships are made, it is our community. It is our whole way of life. And we will fight for these things with all the strength and dedication we possess because we love them…We cannot and will not stand by in silence and watch our countryside, our communities and our way of life destroyed forever by misguided urban political correctness. It is about freedom, the freedom of people to choose how they live their own lives”
‘Hunting Kind’ is aimed at YOU to effectively lobby your MP, which if we are to succeed, you must. It encompasses Wildlife Management, Community Rights/Benefits and the preservation of Cultural Heritage (UNESCO articles on ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’). It is a 4 month initiative to encourage MPs to form a proposal to the Law Commission to replace bad law and regain rural votes.
The aim is to achieve a workable outcome that takes account of the science of wildlife management and consults in the practicalities of delivery for the countryside, with those who best understand it. I will review on 6th June 2022 and see where we stand.
What can you actually DO, you might ask?
Very simply, please have a look at the website;
www.huntingkind.com
There is a flyer to send to your MP, some video clips of speeches made at the International Festival of Hunting, some published articles and the message to replace bad law and regain rural votes.
• Please pass it on to any like-minded friends and family and show your support by clicking the button, in the various categories of ‘Scenthound’, ‘Sighthound’, ‘Terrier’, ‘Gundog’, ‘General support’
• Write to your MP, either having downloaded the flyer or simply just send them an email with the website link.
• Print copies of the flyer collectively if you can and organise a distribution programme, Point to Points, Country Shows, Cheltenham, race meetings, local pub, community hall, wherever you feel best placed.
• Numbers count, if there’s only one thing you do in ’22, let it be this.
If we all stand up now and stand together, we will get the right message into Parliament to have these laws and bills reviewed properly and show MPs the depth of support and how that might look at the ballot box in May 2024. This will encourage pro Rural MPs and assist our hunting organisations to represent us effectively.
To quote Aneurin Bevan MP “Politics is a blood sport” and further “We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over”
I have chosen which lane to be in and the direction of travel. I would hope that you all might do the same, Happy Hunting.
