This is a pretty good documentary about the foxhunting controversy in the UK.
I’m not actually much of an animal rights activist, so some scenes, like where they kill dairy bull calves with a bolt gun to feed the hounds really don’t get me going.
I don’t think this documentary makes the hunt saboteurs look very good. Covering up their faces like that reminds me of the Shining Path terrorists in Peru.
Or the Klan.
These people have created a cult where the fox is like the sacred cow of India. Don’t ever kill a fox! Fox hunting is dog fighting!
Anyone who has ever seen how dogs, even very nice ones, react to the sight of a fox will tell you that dogs don’t think of foxes as being the same species.
Plus, even if it were two members of the same species, it’s not fighting at all. The fox almost always gets away without a dog laying a fang on it.
But when you have a Labour Party that decided to stab its most hardcore supporters in the back in the 1980’s, then have Tony Blair come in and continue the job as a “socialist” prime minister, the only bone it could throw to its “base” was to come up with convoluted foxhunting ban (which is full of loopholes).
And then St. Tony of the Foxes proceeded to join the Great Texan Liberator into the clusterfuck and outright crime that was the Iraq War.
He was more willing to push for the perceived rights of foxes than for the rights over how many people were killed in Iraq.
And that is the story of how perverse the modern political world is.
The left is left protesting badger culls and signing petitions to save the life of giraffes while the whole damned project of building decent societies based upon social democratic principles is being eviscerated.
If you want to know the big reason I don’t care too much for animal rights activism, it’s because it’s a giant distraction.
And it allows scumbags like Tony Blair to claim to be for progressive ideals while doing the exact opposite.
The bill is not only against foxhunting but all hunting with dogs including coursing. If you dog chases a squirrel it is hunting. As for badger, it has been scientifically documented that they are responsible for tuberculosis in cattle.
What they need is that guy in Cornwall who eats road-killed badger, especially their heads.
The bottom line is that the anti hunting with dogs lobby did win in the end. The hunting bullies, despite their friend Cameron, lost on this issue.
They lost and the dogs lost.
And the Labour Party is pathetic.
And they aren’t bullies at all, unlike the Shining Path Sabs. They just want to ride to hounds as their ancestors did.
The problem is that the historical legacy of the Enclosure makes these politics palatable. Where we had Teddy Roosevelt who created a hunting and wildlife management culture based upon the common treasury, in the Uk, forests were enclosed and set aside as hunting parks while the peasants starved.
The Charter of the Forest came out the same year as Magna Carta, and it declared the forests a common treasury as Roosevelt had done. It was denuded in the centuries of avarice and industrialization.
And that’s why I found the anti-hunting politics in the UK just baffling.
You would literally be laughed out of town if you tried to sabotage a hunt in the US, and what’s more, interfering with a hunt of any sort is illegal in most states. In mine, the penalty is always jail time.
“You go through lots of horses then you find a nice one”
I absolutely cannot stand hunting at least in the UK, it’s the horses that suffer the most, “you have a special relationship with a horse” say the brainless wonder.
What absolute bollocks! The riders are some of the worst I’ve ever seen in the world, they throw these poor horses around the countryside with scant regard for their safety at all. So bad is it I once saw an add in the Horse and Hound that went like this: Broken your hunter need a new one contact…… This was in the middle of the hunting season. Each season begins with the sale of hunters and continues until the season is finished, they are treated like disposable commodities.
Each season these poor animals get shipped across from Ireland then trashed in the British countryside by the scores. If ever the words hooligan rabble had meaning this would be it. What’s left after the season is a heap of damaged “broken” horses good for nothing but the knackers yard.
I would never ever knowingly sell a horse to one these riders ever.
These idiots are weekend riders they live in the city and trash horses in the weekend as far removed from the countryside as it can get. Most couldn’t ride any other way but badly they would be a laughing stock in any competition.
Unfortunately they are not the exception but the rule.
Eventing is different riders know how to ride the horses are carefully trained and brought on every minute detail worked out. Courses are designed with safety in mind, they are walked and calculated before the ride. The whole thing a flowing partnership between horse and rider. Each level carefully progressed as the team builds confidence and ability. The riders have to be able to ride a passable dressage test and get around a show jumping course. Accidents happen but the horses mostly live long competitive lives.
I quite honestly don’t give a fig if the hunting ban remains in place for ever!
The one and only time I would ever be able to say Blair got it right is on this issue. If the fox runs free as a result good for it.