Ignorance May Yet Prove to be a Treatable Disease

From Jeanette Winterson's web site which I stumbled across. She is a writer of books and columns for various newspapers. This is obviously an old piece, but it has not spoiled on the shelf.

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The Guardian The Countryside Debate

When I moved to the Cotswolds eight years ago, I was anti-hunt. I had never been to a Meet, talked to any of the characters involved, or visited the kennels. I knew nothing about horses. Yet I was wary of imposing my views on people I had only just met, so I decided to test my instincts against the reality of the situation. I agreed to let the Hunt continue to ride over my land a season. In the meantime, I learned to ride myself, and I spent a lot of time listening and watching.

I became friendly with a kennel man, who earns very modestly, lives in a tied cottage, and is content. He does not want to win the lottery or be rich and famous; he wants to breed hounds. He explained to me that you have to stick with the job for at least five years, because that's how long it takes to bring on a hound. There is no reward, other than the work itself.

The stereotype of hunting is the fat men and loud ladies baying for blood at the weekend after a week's stock-broking. There are some of those, but they are not why hunting happens, or why it should be allowed to continue. I believe it should continue, because I have seen how closely hunting meshes with the economic and social fabric of rural living. It is not enough to argue that country people with real skills, who work with dogs and horses, as breeders, farriers, trainers, grooms, whippers-in, muckers -out, should all go and work in tea-shops or sell postcards.

The Countryside March next weekend will not be packed with unspeakable toffs and sinister slit-eyed badger baiters; it will be a march of ordinary people who feel they are being slowly bred to death by an urban drive to make the countryside anaemic.

On the new Animal Farm, Tourism is Good. Farming is Bad. Rambling is Good. Landowning is Bad. Foxes are Good. Hunting is Bad.

These cheap, dreary polarities tell no truth, but they are politically useful to New Labour, who have handled the issues around Farming, Hunting, and the Right to Roam, clumsily enough to turn genuine questions needing to be asked, into walls of mutual animosity.

Labour talks about bring a One Nation Party, but that will never happen while urban values are forced on the Countryside in the name of Democracy.

It is true that country sports, and the employment they generate, involve killing animals. If we were a nation of vegetarians, our objections to hunting might carry more weight, but I am out of sympathy with the hypocrisy of those who seize on fox hunting as easy prey, while ignoring the more urgent issues of animal welfare and husbandry.

Why is it perfectly acceptable to eat meat that has been reared in misery, brutally transported and badly butchered, but unacceptable to ride to hounds?
Why is it fine to keep a large dog in a small city flat, but disreputable to be a terrier man?

There is no logic to the hunting issue, and it makes no sense to ban hunting, and licence shooting and fishing. The next target will be eventing and racing. In any case, all equestrian sport begins on the hunting field; it is the only place to socialise horses.

Drag hunting? Well, if it placates your conscience, fine, but it won't save the life of a single fox, who may not thank you for your kindness in shooting or gassing him, instead of hunting him.

Meanwhile, intensive farming, which is what the public demands because it wants cheap food, will continue. That means declining wildlife and the abject conditions of reared stock.

Here's a true story.

I keep hens. If you keep hen you also keep rats. Nobody is interested in a Rat Protection Bill, so you can kill them as you wish. The best way - and the most dramatic - is to get in a terrier man. Boots up to the knee are essential, unless you are truly hard, and content to tie the bottoms of your trousers with string.

Once the rats are on the move, the terriers are loosed, and will dig them out. It is a fast-moving, high adrenaline pursuit, and when the dogs really get going, two of them will jump a rat and pull it apart like a Christmas cracker.
The man who does this for me has a thirteen year old boy who goes to a school in town. He told me how his teacher had over-heard him talking about our ratting weekend, and made an example of him before the class. The teacher said that what James had done was brutal and unnecessary. They are kinder ways to kill rats.

'No' said James, and tried to explain that Warfarin, the poison of choice, takes three days to kill a rat, who bleeds to death through the stomach. Any animal or bird that eats the rat will be poisoned too.

To trap a rat humanely, you must bait the trap with a sausage - so too bad for the pig - and the rat still has to be killed somehow. I've tried this method, and either you drown the rat in a bucket or you blow its brains out. Either way it squeals continuously.

Is James de-sensitised by his ratting days? Does shooting crows with his air rifle and hanging them upside down to scare off other birds, make him a coarser boy than he would be if he hung around shopping malls or slobbed in front of the telly?

In the endless debate about rural and urban values, which seems to obsess around the hunting issue, no-one asks how it has de-sensitised and coarsened human beings to live in cities, cut off from our evolutionary environment,
William Wordsworth was one of the first writers to confront the deadness of urban living in the new industrial revolution. We think of him vaguely as a Nature poet, but his work was not about nature, it was about Nature's effect on the soul of Man - and what happens to the soul when it loses Nature's daily presence.

What certainly happens is that cut off from the realities of Nature, we become outraged by them. Nature, and animals, are amoral. Our own morality has developed around a careful code of protecting ourselves from others and others from ourselves Freud took the view that we create civilisation to save us from the ruthlessness of the natural world. It is good that we should do so - it is not good when we re-interpret the natural world as a moral failure; a primitive state that needs constant intervention.

New Labour believes in constant intervention, but what the countryside needs is to draw up its own agenda for change and sustainability. If that includes hunting, so be it.

I hope that the international crisis will not be used as an excuse to dismiss the March as minority moaning. The problems of this small island remain the same in miniature as the problem presently facing the whole world; how do we live side by side, without forcing everyone to live in the same way?