Lord Mancroft

Catherine Austen talks to the chairman of the Masters of Foxhounds Association about where hunting finds itself and what the future might hold

- Catherine Austen

HOW many people reading this magazine could explain what the Masters of Foxhounds Association (MFHA) actually does? Most people who have hunted for any length of time will have heard of it but, unless they hold or have held office within a hunt, they may know very little about it. Lord Mancroft, chairman of the MFHA and of the Council of Hunting Associations, is planning to change that.

“I think most hunting people don’t have any idea what the Hunting Office and the MFHA do, and up until now we’ve taken the view that they aren’t very interested. They love hunting, but they don’t really care about its administrators,” he says. “In the same way that you want to go to Wimbledon, but you aren’t really interested in the Lawn Tennis Association.

“The Hunting Office has never had any PR for itself as an organisation. In the last year we have realised that that probably has to change. We need to be more public, and we need to promote ourselves, which we have not done before. This is not a revolution, it is the next step of evolution.”

The MFHA has come in for a good deal of criticism in recent times, most of it undeserved. Its very name is easy to mock, conjuring up images of redcoated, red-faced men. But explain that, despite its slightly archaic title, it is one member of the Council of Hunting Associations, all of whom come under the banner of “The Hunting Office”, which acts as administrator to registered packs of foxhounds, beagles, harriers, bassets and deerhounds, and people begin to understand.

Most of the time it deals with the things that allow hunts to function — employment law, insurance, health and safety, and building issues. It runs a lot of excellent training courses. None of these things are particularly exciting to the outside world.

But it also sets the rules and standards by which hunting is governed, and enforces them.