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Hounded to Death The mother fox is zig-zagging quickly from hedge to tree. The people in red coats are out to get her–will she, like most foxes, escape? This is a British foxhunt. Will you please join me in an imaginary helicopter for a bird’s-eye view? I interviewed the League Against Cruel Sports, a huntsman, and the Hunt Saboteurs Association. Based on information from them, I’ll recreate for you what a foxhunt really is. If we'd been watching a few minutes earlier, we'd have seen Ms. Fox leave her two-week old babies for the first time, for an hour or so to explore the woods. A mile away, hunters sipped from wine glasses and chatted politely, then mounted horses, blew the horn and took off with 35 hounds trailing. We'd have seen Ms. Fox hiding in the nearest hedge when she heard the hooves, and the hunters cheering the hounds on to catch her. The fox darted away, and now she's getting more out of breath every minute. Now the push is on for the horses to clear high hurdles at breakneck speed to reach the fox. "We know of many of these horses who fell and got injured, "said Ben Stewart, research officer for the League Against Cruel Sports (LACS). " The horses were then destroyed." The fast ride thrills foxhunters: "You could probably get 50 reasons from people for why they hunt, " said Patrick Martin of Bicester Kennels, who’s led foxhunts for at least seven years. "The wind in their hair. The thrill of the chase. The enjoyment of hearing the hounds. The freedom. And the countryside." One hound is shrieking in pain because he jumped onto a barbed-wire fence and can't get off. "Just about every day a hunt goes out, one of its dogs will cut his pads or tail badly on barbed wire," said Paul Gammon, press officer for the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HAS), which has witnessed and tried to save foxes' lives at tens of thousands of hunts since 1962. "When hounds chase foxes, they ignore everything else." Sometimes hounds get bloodied from brambles or broken glass. About once a season, one hound in each hunt pack will fall to his death chasing a fox to the edge of a 100-foot quarry, Gammon reported. "Hundreds of hounds have run into trains an cars and been killed," added Stewart. One train crushed eleven hounds at once. Will our shrieking hound get help for his cuts? Maybe not. "Generally, if dogs are so injured that they can't hunt, hunters choose to shoot them rather than have a vet rehabilitate them," claimed Stewart, who has seen hunters report this in publications. Now let's watch the 34 hounds that haven't been injured. If they don't kill pet dogs or cats or livestock as some hounds have done, they're still tracking Ms. Fox. To understand what the fox might be going through, let's mentally get out of our helicopters now and pretend we're her, running from 34 dogs. As Ms. Fox what do you feel? No doubt you're worried about your babies - they'll probably starve if you can't get home. You frantically search for a hole to escape down, not knowing that people involved with the hunt filled up every hole they could find during the night. Even if you outrun the hounds, you might not be strong enough to find food. One U.S. researcher autopsied foxes chased for five minutes by dogs, and foxes clenched for two to eight hours by excruciating body-gripping traps. Chasing causes foxes as much stress as trapping, the researcher found: both groups of foxes had heart and lung hemorrhages and the kind of muscle breakdown that's often followed by brain damage, paralysis and death. "Even if a hunted fox escapes. Her health could be severely damaged, even to the extent that she would die, " said Stewart. Gammon added, "Some foxes who are chased very hard collapse in cold drains and die slowly of pneumonia." Can you hear the hounds baying for you and the people cheering them to run faster? You might be wondering, "Why is everyone so keen on killing me? What have I done wrong?" You probably never killed a lamb: The Ministry of Agriculture surveyed three sheep counties and only .5 percent of lamb deaths were due to foxes. You probably couldn't nab a chicken if you tried: About 98 percent of UK chickens are kept in warehouses. The Ministry of Agriculture says the threat from your kind is "negligible," so why are 34 dogs nearly upon you now? Foxes are vermin and need to be controlled," said Martin. "Foxhunting is one of the most humane ways control them." Ban foxhunting, he added, and more foxes will be killed by farmers These farmers use snaring and other more painful methods than foxhunting. Gammon, who has tried to rescue foxes at hunts for at least 15 years, disagreed: "If foxhunting is banned, snaring and other methods of killing will not increase. Foxhunting kills only about three percent of foxes–that isn't enough to make a difference to farmers." Some research has shown that hunting foxes makes them reproduce more. Suddenly you feel the first hound's teeth on your back leg. What happens now is so unpleasant that many of you might stop reading at this point if you had to continue being Ms. Fox. So let's mentally become people again, and escape back up to our helicopter. Just in time to see Ms. Fox shriek as at least ten hounds each chomp into a different part of her body and yank her until she rips. "Usually ten or more dogs do the job in 20 seconds," said Gammon, who's witnessed such killings. "with fewer dogs, it's more drawn out." Many foxes die from having their guts ripped out: "We've taken bodies to a vet and the autopsy showed that," Gammon said. "The foxes are not ripped to death - they're killed instantaneously," asserted Martin, who said his main pleasure in foxhunting is to see all his dog-training pay off. Ms. Fox, like the other 10,000 foxes killed each year by hunts, has left us. But wait, there's another fox to hunt today. Will this one get away? Maybe so, because some of the hounds are starting to tire. Still, they might be smart to not slow down too much. "At every hunt I've seen, dogs have whimpered and cowered on the ground from seeing hunters raise their whips," said Gammon, who assumes this means the hounds were beaten as part of their training. He's read foxhound training books advocating whipping, but Patrick insisted, "the whip is just for show. Hunters keep these hounds because they love them. They don't need to be told not to beat them." If hounds slow down too much, when they get home they'll probably get a bullet in the head. "Huntsmen kill about 10,000 hounds each year," said Stewart, who based this figure on the huntsmen's own counts. Usually the dog's nearing six or seven and can't keep up with the younger dogs. Some doomed hounds won't jump into hedges after foxes; others won't yelp when they see foxes; still others babble too much. "When puppies have short legs or other undesirable characteristics," said Stewart, "they're killed. Some huntsmen have admitted killing pups simply for being the wrong color." "Rubbish," said Patrick. "Puppies who aren't good hunters are given away to other packs." He admitted, though, "Hunters don't re-home their retired dogs. It's more humane to put the hounds down because they wouldn't be happy in private homes away from the pack and without all the exercise." The RSPCA and LACS believe most hounds would make fine pets and have asked hunters to let them re-home the dogs. But the vast majority of hunters have refused. Thankfully, the hounds all seem to be keeping up with each other today. Still the second fox manages, like about 70 percent of hunted foxes to escape down a hole! Gammon, whose group has witnessed thousands of underground kills, described what usually happens next: He saw one fox come out of the hole with half his back leg missing. Our fox is luckier than that: only a Jack Russell to bark at him, then men pinning him down with a spade and shooting him. Fortunately for our fox, the gun didn't jam - "When dirt flies around and clogs up the guns," Gammon said,"often people kill foxes by bashing their heads with spades." Our fox also had it good because he wasn't thrown live to hounds. "The vast majority of underground foxes are shot," Gammon said, "but occasionally people break the hunting association rules and let the hounds tear foxes apart." The LACS videotaped one such killing, and the HAS's undercover people say it happens more then hunters don't think anyone's watching. If the hunters we've been watching had sent, say, a Patterdale Terrier down to the fox we probably would have heard growling, snarling and shrieks of pain. Then we probably would have seen the terrier and fox emerge, both bloody. "The fox's teeth tear into the terrier's muzzle," said Gammon who has photos of a terrier with most of its nose bitten off. "Often foxes kill terriers" Sometimes terriers get trapped under the earth and the people can never get them out again, Gammon added. The Masters of Foxhounds Association's rules governing terrier work ensure no unnecessary suffering, Patrick told me. "Please impress on your readers that we huntsmen love our hounds as much as they live their own pet dogs," he says. "If anything happens to our hounds, we feel mortified, It's a total love affair - just like having 140 children in your care. Seventy-three percent of British people want foxhunting and other bloodsports banned, says a 1996 MORI poll. "Ban foxhunting with dogs," said Ben Stewart of the League Against Cruel Sports," and you’ll also save the 50,000 foxes killed by Lurchers and terriers outside official foxhunting." You’ll stop a lot of badger baiters, to, who won’t be able to use their most common excuse when caught: "I was hunting foxes." Ban foxhunting, and British children will learn to value kindness more, Stewart claimed. "When animal cruelty is a sport to get pleasure from, that debases society and promotes even more animal cruelty."
League Against Cruel Sports Countryside Alliance (promoting foxhunting)
by Ambuja Rosen |
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