Fox Off
I’ll let you into a not even secret. Back in the eighties my uncle used to be a hound master. Every summer us kids would go off and spend a couple of weeks on the farm where his kennels were and make idyllic childhood memories playing with puppies and horses and rambling the countryside. Like most hunting kennels, there was an abattoir attached where my uncle provided a service to local farms collecting old and sick stock/horses and “dealing” with them. How else do you think 100 hounds are fed? I have vivid memories of turning up every summer on blindingly hot days, the smell of putrefying carcasses and guts that spilled out of maggot infested industrial bins burning your nose. After the first day, you didn’t smell it any more and the air became a dense sweet fatty cream, infused with pony sweat, disinfectant and dog piss/shit. We sat in the puppy enclosures surrounded by cow’s heads gnawed to the bone, nights were infused by the sporadic chorus of hounds “giving tongue”, in the mornings my uncle would chuck meat all over an acre paddock attached to the kennel pens and let the hounds loose for the day in the field, to dig and fight and lay in the sun.
I was a kid. As a kid in the eighties I didn’t question. I loved dogs. I loved my summers at my uncle and auntie’s house. I was a town kid, what did I know about the countryside. I got to play with puppies and groom ponies and explore the old stable yard with tackrooms full of leather soap smell, old eventing silks, moth-eaten ancient hunting “pinks” and harness and bins full of mollases soaked oats and barns full of sweet hay and walls full of rosettes… how I longed to win a rosette… I never did.
My uncle was a typical hot headed English country stereotype, broad, balding, mostly toothless, who manhandled everything in life. He called a spade a spade and people fucking idiots to their face if he thought so. He laughed deep and hard and worked the same way. He rode horses like he was entering into battle. He lifted my cousins onto his shoulders like they were bags of feed and sat them on the back of freshly dead and twitching horses. That is “how it was”. He loved his hounds and his horses in the way country men do; With a sentiment reserved only for “the best ones”, the one’s that lived up to that anthropomophised version of the “good hard working, clever animal”. I have no doubt that people who hunt “love their animals”, but as I say, in the sort of way that will shoot them in the head to give them an honourable death should they flounder in the field or with age, like some war story battlefield hero bullshit. I have no doubt that a tiny portion of their soul even “loves” the fox, in the way huntsmen do, for the thrill and wily chase, imagining an honourable surrender at the end after a long, “dignified” fight. My uncle was an old-skool countryman, hailing from an old Somerset family. But, like everything in the UK he was bound by class. Although his family owned land, he was definitely NOT aristocracy, or landed gentry. The farm in Wales where he lived and kept the hounds for the local district hunt, was owned by the “Hunt Master “ (even the lingo is fucking outdated) and my uncle was employed to manage and run the hounds. When his job ended, so did the roof over his head
The hunts are very much a remnant of empire and the ruling class system. We don’t live in Victorian, Edwardian or even 80’s Britain! We live in Ireland for a start. The idea of the hunt over here is some sort of fucked up immortalisation of the tugged forlocking of the “Planters”. The West Waterford hunt round my way is made up of, lets be honest here, Protestants and the anglo-Irish. Families round here who generally have the best land, a nice house (at least one), typically send their kids to private school. That’s what the hunt is about! It is a display of mastery over nature AND people, I can travel over any land I want because me and my mates own it and everything on it. A hound and a horse are loved as a symbol, for their bloodlines, for their power and discipline and for their monetary value. The fox is admired for its cunning, but ultimately MUST be controlled.
If you want the hunt to remain, don’t be a fucking dickhead all your life and grow the fuck up! Defending the hunt is like displaying your love of the British empire! You may as well raise the Union flag and fellate an aristocrat on live TV! Those that “follow the hunt” over here would have been the same cunts who reported their neighbours for fishing the English landlord’s river, or eating the landlord’s berries during the famine, just so they could get a morsel out of the scrap bucket over at the big house.
Somewhere along the lines, people who hunt have intertwined the nice feelings of being outside in the weather, the thrill of galloping on a horse and being with dogs and friends, with shredding a fox.. like the shredding the fox part is the only part that makes doing all these things worth it! Spoiler alert lads, you can do these things without the shredded fox bit. Just grow up. Allow yourselves the grace to admit this shit belongs to another time.
I didn’t have time to get this up before the vote and it seems the majority of the Irish government are still up for getting servile when it comes to dealing with “The Empire’s” traditions.. Jacob Reese Mogg and Jeremy Clarkson thank you.. their mates will be over soon to have a go at shredding some “Irish vermin” and have a good laugh about it too probably.. eye-roll.
