Endless Guitar Solos and the Real Reasons for Opposing Fox Hunting. (2/3) By Mark Pollard

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3)

I thought this was a touch ironic, given the vast number of beasts of almost every hue that must have been slaughtered on his behalf over the years; I also thought, Erect a better fence then, you dickhead. It's only a dog-sized mammal you're up against here, not a fucking civil engineer with a poultry fixation. I guess you've figured out where I stand on the matter now. But it's alright - I'm allowed to say these things because I was born and raised in the countryside. I may have spent most of my adult life swilling around various cess-pits of urban ignorance, but I know what country life is all about. I know what it's really all about, too.

Unlike most townies, who don't understand rural life (what's so hard to understand about killing things, by the way?) I have first-hand insight after years of watching the Holderness Hunt trampling indiscriminately across the field at the bottom of my parents' garden.

Here's the twist, though. A twist that, I hope, will distinguish my anti-hunt stance from the usual vegan, tree-hugging, animal rights perspective. Not that I have anything but admiration for those principles, it's just that I'm shooting from a different gallery. Firing from a different grassy knoll. Either way, it's a viewpoint that seemingly fewer people today will admit to occupying. More on that later....

You see, it's not particularly the cruelty issue that causes me to rail against these feudal fuckwits. I just don't feel that strongly about animal welfare these days, although I used to, and I know that I still should. I think it's all tied in with becoming a parent; once you've created human life yourself, you can go one way or the other with regards to the sanctity of existence in the animal kingdom.

You can start to see all living things as somehow sacred and beautiful (which I still do, for the most part) and then change the way you behave towards them by starting to do things like only purchasing eggs of the free-range variety (which I don't, for the most part). Or you can find your day-to-day life so hamstrung and blighted by the wailing demands of your offspring that you just couldn't give a knack about anything other than getting them fed, bathed, read to and in bed for the night.

Don't get me wrong - the plight of battery hens does concern me, but just not enough these days. I'm sorry, but after raising three admittedly smelly and noisy, but nonetheless beautiful and intelligent children, I just find it hard to see chickens as anything other than smelly, noisy, ugly and dumb. Regularly stepping in dog shit on the pavement outside my house doesn't help the animal rights cause either, but that's a rant for another day. What is it that irks me so about fox hunting then? What does motivate me above all else? Well, despite what I just said about not really caring much about animal welfare these days, I'm still vehemently opposed to wanton and deliberate cruelty towards them.

This motivates me to an extent. While I might not buy free-range eggs and I might buy meat that came from a slaughterhouse that doesn't treat its livestock quite as humanely as it ought to, there's still a big difference between this and the deliberate, drawn-out pursuit and tearing apart of a fox by a pack of hounds, and the accompanying, unbridled celebration of the death.

The day that slaughterhouse staff turn up in velvet coats sipping sherry, blowing horns and shouting Tally Ho as they stride excitedly across the abattoir floor to administer a bolt to the head of unsuspecting animals is the day that we will have to stop levelling accusations of cruelty at fox-hunters. Animal death is permissible (enthusiastic carnivores might say essential) in today's society, but the act of killing should never be something to be enjoyed. So the cruelty factor is a key issue, if not quite as emotive as it once was for me.

Something that I do find quite motivating, provocative even, are the naked contradictions and fallacies that infest hunt supporters' reasoning. For example, if you suggest that there are better ways to control the fox population, such as a professional marksman with a hi-tech, high-powered rifle, they will try and convince you that hunting with horse and hounds is still the most efficient method.

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