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| The RSPCA suits up to end all hunting. |
THE RSPCA’S NEW CAUSE
With the end of World War II, the RSPCA found it needed a new cause. Cart horses and buggy whips had simply disappeared.
Though genuine cases of animal abuse still occurred, these were local problems and not the kind of expansive issues needed to sustain a national fundraising campaign.
As the nation was new, so would the RSPCA have to think anew.
Earlier RSPCA campaigns had attacked the sport and livelihood of the poor. Now was the time to take the battle to the other half.
The battle to ban fox hunting was enjoined in 1949. That year Britain banned the use of leghold traps and poison against any animal larger than a rat.
That same year two private member’s bills to ban or restrict fox hunting were introduced. Both bills failed to make it onto the statute books. One was withdrawn, the other defeated on its second reading in the House of Commons.
No matter. The animal rights movement settled in for the long fight, content they had found a controversy robust enough to serve as a fundraising vehicle for the next 50 years.
Out in the countryside, of course, animals continued to reproduce. Rabbits were seen as a particularly noxious problem not only because of significant crop loss in some areas, but also because very large rabbit warrens cut into the side of railroad embankments, occasionally weakening track beds.
In the early 1950s, the British purposefully imported a rabbit disease called myxomatosis from South America (via France). The hope was that the disease would help "control" the U.K.’s rabbit population.
The myxoma virus was a frightfully efficient killer, wiping out 98 percent of all rabbits in Great Britain within a decade of its introduction. One result of this unhappy turn of events was that the ancient rabbit warrens that had once served as natal dens and sources of food for fox simply vanished.
In order to help out Mother Nature, and improve the chance that a fox would take up residence on hunt land, many hunts constructed artificial dens out of brick, slate and clay drainage pipe. If well-sited these artificial earths could be counted on to house a fox and, thanks to straight and smooth sides, a larger terrier could be used to force a bolt.
FOOLISH YOUTH
The 1960s saw a wage increase in the U.K., and an increase in leisure time as well. More young people had easy access to cars, and as a result more young men were able to get out into the countryside.
Impatient young men eager for experience, and with a “dominance” attitude towards all thing wild and natural, found badger earths easier to locate than fox dens, especially in the summer and early fall when fox were rarely found to ground.
Many of these same young men sought “push button terriers” that would start right out of the box, but which too often ended up too hard for sensible badger work.
With the entry of hundreds of young men into the terrier world, a kind of culture war seems to have occurred. On one side were the older diggers who knew more about wild animals and places and tended to be more conservation-minded. These older diggers stressed the value of bagging and moving badgers rather than killing them. This was the generation that had seen poison and traps sharply reduce fox and badger numbers in many areas.
On the other side were young men who wanted to “prove” their dogs, and who considered a badly scarred-up terrier as possessing the only true “red badge of courage” — never mind that it was more often the “scarlet letter” of inexperience, or the wreckage of overheated canine aggression.
Too many young men with too many over-hard dogs chasing too few badgers created a situation which fell right into the hands of animal rights advocates.
As Eddie Chapman writes in his excellent book, The Working Jack Russell Terrier [Dorset Press, 1985]:
“The macho terrier men ... with the image that they portrayed, gave the antis all the fuel they needed to persuade the general public that with literally hundreds of new people suddenly joining the sport, too much pressure was being put on the Badger population, so that it was in danger of being extinct, and ‘bang’ a Law was passed that protected them from being dug.”
Along with the first restrictions on badger digging, the 1970s saw the first use of terrier locator collars and telemetry boxes.
Terrier transmitters and receivers made by Deben Industries are relatively simple affairs. A very small transmitter, about the size of the first two joints of your little finger, is attached to a terrier’s collar.
This transmitter sends a very weak radio-signal to a handheld receiver which is about the size of a thick cigarette pack or portable AM pocket radio. Inside the receiver is a small directional antennae. By turning a volume dial on the side of the receiver box, the location and depth of the dog can be ascertained (though not always with perfect accuracy, and never under a power line).
No invention has done more to save terrier lives than the locator collar, and today no one with an ounce of common sense would allow a dog to go to ground without one.
Locator collar technology does have a downside, however. Prior to the invention of locator collars, mute dogs were considered nearly worthless, as they could not be dug to unless you were willing to trench an entire earth. With the new locator collars, however, mute dogs found a place in the field and this trend has, unfortunately, proliferated, degrading the quality of the terrier gene pool by encouraging the use of over-hard mute dogs.
BULLDOZERS AND "THE BAN”
The 1980s saw rapid changes in the British countryside. Large numbers of city people began to buy mini-estates in areas that had once been dominated by working farms, and these mini-estate owners sometimes clashed with fox hunters who trespassed onto their property.
During this same period of time, increasing numbers of farmers began to adopt the massive machines needed to make a go of it in the world of modern agriculture. Large combines, harvesters, and loaders required large fields and wide entrances. Ancient hedges were often leveled to accommodate the new machines, and even more destruction occurred when road widening was done to accommodate ever-increasing numbers of people and cars.
During a single 10-year period (1984-1993), more than one-third of all of the hedgerows in the United Kingdom were lost — a whopping 121,875 miles of destruction. Another 96,000 miles of hedgerow had been lost in England in the previous 40 years (1945-1984).
Ironically, the hedges of the Enclosure Movement were now falling under the onslaught of population growth. It was not quite as Malthus had predicted, but people were indeed having an impact on the land.
In 1997, the final push to ban fox hunting in Great Britain was launched when the Labour Party won the general election with a promise that it would advocate “new measures to promote animal welfare, including a free vote in Parliament on whether hunting with hounds should be banned.”
In fact several “free votes” were had in Parliament, but though the House of Commons passed a fox hunting ban several times, the ban was routinely defeated in the House of Lords.
In September of 2002, 400,000 people from across the country marched through central London in support of fox hunting -- the largest political rally in British history up to that time.
Once again, the House of Lords rejected a fox hunting ban. A “free vote in Parliament,” it turned out, would not result in a ban on fox hunting in the U.K. A non-free vote would have to be gerrymandered.
In September of 2004, Prime Minister Tony Blair grew tired of the inconvenience of a two-house parliamentary system and decided to use the little-used Parliament Act to overrule the House of Lords. The “ban” on fox hunting thus became law in October of 2004.
“The Ban” took effect in February of 2005, but so far has been somewhat less successful than its supporters had hoped. During the first month mounted hunts in the U.K. killed about 800 fox, most of them legally shot as they bolted for cover.
The fact that fox could still be legally killed by the hunts came as a surprise to many poorly informed anti-hunt proponents. In fact, under the “ban” terrier work is still allowed, but only two dogs can be employed at a dig, and the fox must be shot after it bolts. The fox cannot be allowed to bolt free and unharmed, nor can it be terminated with a straight shot to the brainpan while it is still in the earth.
In short, the ban did nothing but mandate death, replacing the safest and most humane form of fox control with one that is less safe and less humane. Such is progress when the ignorant craft laws.
It remains to be seen what will happen in the U.K. next, but if past is prologue, the animal rights movement will field-test new campaigns to see which of them will generate the best direct mail returns.
A push to further restrict mounted fox hunting seems likely. A renewed push to ban the use of snares is assured. A push to ban the hunting of pen-raised birds and to ban sport angling may be just around the corner.
Meanwhile, the biggest threat to wildlife in the U.K. -- habitat loss -- remains unaddressed by the animal rights movement. Wild bird populations are in decline as habitat is degraded and eliminated. Fox once humanely dispatched by hunters are now “saved” to be struck by cars and die broken and starving in ditches. Still others succumb to long-term debilitating diseases, such as mange and distemper.
It comes as news to most animal rights proponents that in the wild animals do not expire in hospital beds with morphine drips. Nature is violent, and natural death is almost always an extended misery, and not a short one. In the wild, it is a lucky animal that makes it to adulthood to meet a competent and humane hunter on its last day. It is a truth that nonhunters never seem to consider.
The question then is not whether an animal will die, but how it will die and what can be done to make sure a species is maintained in optimum balance with the environment. In this regard, mounted hunts and terrier work are ideal, as they are the most humane form of fox control and also the least efficient.
What this means is that extirpation of fox over a wide area is quite impossible with horse and hound, terrier and spade, while elimination of the occasional “problem fox” is still possible without having to resort to poisoning, traps and shooting over bait.
In his masterful book, Running With the Fox [Guild Publishing, 1987], fox biologist David MacDonald notes that “fox hunting is of minor significance to foxes” terms of reducing their numbers. Of greater importance, argues MacDonald, is the fact that fox hunters in the U.K. routinely stand up for the kind of habitat protection essential to healthy fox populations.
When a history of irony is written, surely a few paragraphs will be devoted to this: that nothing has benefitted fox more than fox hunting, while nothing has harmed working dogs more than admiration by the Kennel Club.
2 comments:
I have enjoyed reading this- since terriers and dachshunde( i hunt with a wirehaired Teckel in austria) have always also been used for hunting badger explains the bigger chest of continental earthdogs-our foxes den mainly in badger earths. nowadays it is hard to find a dachshund with a chest smaller than 40cm. in hunting badgers actually a over aggressive dog is not to be wanted-you want a dog that bays at the badger an only bites when it turns back to dig away- but soft dogs only work badger once.Even in dachshund, actually a houndbreed, that has to pass a test if gives cry on a warm haretrail, very hard dogs tend to have little cry, best regards J.Plenk
Really informative series of entries; thanks for putting in the time to detail it. I'll never remember it all, but am grateful it will reside in your archives to refer to later on.
The terrier being held by the man in the photo is HUGE. It looks more like a fat Beagle than a Jack Russell.
Seahorse
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