The first thing I would like to make quite clear is that we cannot proceed on banning fox hunting because its unnecessary. A lot of friends who want the ban argue that it is unnecessary so it should be banned. This argument is rubbish because we all do quite unnecessary things every day just because we want to. There are thousands of sports fisherman and recreational hunters in the UK and it’s quite unnecessary that they do it yet we are not about to ban them.
I intend to proceed on the basis of fox hunting being unnecessarily cruel. This is very apparent to me and anyone with a pair of working eyes.
Fox’s have been portrayed by the hunters as a farmers worst nightmare and that this little demon kills everything on site and thus the less of them the better in their book. There is some truth in this (see “surplus killing” on Google), fox’s are not angels but then neither are domestic cats. Having been raised in a village that loved pigeon racing it was very apparent to us that the cute little kitty cat next door wanted to kill every single bird in the shed and would do so without remorse. What did we do? We made sure that they could not get into the shed. We didn’t chase them around the neighborhood with 50 dogs.
Anywhere someone makes a living from the land we will always have a conflict between the farmer and the predator. A farmer has every right to protect his animals from these marauders. However, this does not give anyone the right to be cruel to an animal and most farmers respect this.
Fox hunting is unnecessary because it is actually easier to shoot a fox than it is to gather together a team of hunters with their dogs and chase it across the country. This is the point that I stated earlier that was an insufficient argument to ban fox hunting. What is sufficient is the fact that it’s cruel.
The fox is chased down by a team of dogs and then killed. The actual death of the fox may not actually be that pleasant either. Unfortunately a lot of hunters would like you to believe that the fox is killed quickly. This is the biggest lie they seem to push because they know beyond all shadow of a doubt that the fox does not die quickly. It is quite easy to get your hands on a video where you will see a fox being disemboweled and it will still continue to fight until the end. These are the lucky ones……
They unlucky ones are the ones that are smart and go to ground. The fox knows it’s being hunted so it determines that if it goes deep enough no natural predator would be getting to it. What the fox doesn’t factor in is the human with the shovel (the spade brigade) who is prepared to dig the fox out and let the dogs rip it to shreds.
What we don’t hear about are the terrier men who send terriers down after the fox either of which may die from their injuries. There are recorded videos of terrier men digging down to a fox and then setting teams of terriers on the animal until it is killed. The so called men claim that this is not cruel yet it can go on for up to half an hour. It is illegal to dig a badger from its hole. Why then should we not extend the same courtesy to the fox who might happen to have went down a badger sett.
Sending terriers down after a fox is the closest thing these terrier men can get to a dog fight with little or no fear of a prosecution if caught in the act, or even with a video of the act which has happened in the past.
My argument above is weak at best so I will leave you with a much better argument against fox hunting… the facts… Pack of lies