Surprise on a surreal caper

A ‘hybrid hunt’ in Scotland results in an extraordinary encounter for Soldier Palmer

When the laws around hunting were changed, country people reacted with wonderful flexibility. The ban failed to bring hunting to a standstill, so other sports expanded to fill the gaps left by the new legislation. Foxhunting never died, it simply became something different. This is particularly true of Scotland, where gun packs picked up most of the slack after the 2002 Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act.

Using a pack of hounds to drive a fox towards waiting Guns is nothing new, but it suddenly became mainstream as the law changed. Ironically, this technique is frequently more effective than the traditional chase and it’s fair to guess that more foxes are now killed by gun packs than were ever caught under the old methods. You could call this an own-goal for the animal rights campaigners who pushed for the ban to protect foxes in the first place.

As a child, I heard some hunting types argue that foxes should only be killed as part of the chase. I distinctly remember a huntsman saying that “a gentleman would never shoot a fox”. That puzzled me. Having been brought up on a farm, I was hardly inclined to quibble about how a fox was killed. Surely the important thing was that it was dead and the new lambs were safe.

Stronger

In trying to resist the ban, many of these old ideas were thrown out of the window. The fieldsports community came together as one; shooting people and hunt followers joined up with wildfowlers and hare coursers to resist the pressure applied by Westminster. It seems fitting that we now have a sport that depends upon much better collaboration between huntsmen and Guns. It wasn’t always thus, and external political pressures seem to have made us far stronger.