Totally foxed

The new Scottish law on hunting is a cunning catch-22 situation, but not one designed to help the fox

- Jamie Blackett

THE horse box draws into the kennels and George lets horses and hounds out. There is no need to ask how it went. He is hunched over and clenched with anger and sorrow, like a boy at a funeral. The great conservative philosopher Edmund Burke described rural society as being made up of little platoons. This platoon, my platoon, has received a devastating blow to its morale.

‘Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad.’ For Sophocles’s Greek deities, we now have to substitute our new masters in the Edinburgh Parliament, who are every bit as capricious. October 3, 2023 was for us the day the Scottish Enlightenment died; its tribunes described it as a great day for animal welfare as the Scottish Hunting with Dogs Bill came into force.