Chris

Hunting's not my thing either, but I've shot or poisoned vermin as necessary in the past.

My objections to the ban are that it is an abuse of democratic principle, in that we are a liberal democracy and therefore the group in power at any given time has no business banning activities enjoyed by minorities as a means of attacking their beliefs or their way of life (or their social class, which we know for a fact was what drove some of the Labour MPs involved).

Furthermore the so called animal rights angle is highly contested - plenty of experts believe that hunting vermin with dogs is a more natural and healthy way of maintaining an ecological balance than random shooting. "fox hunting is cruel" simply is not settled science in the same way that "smoking kills" is. What constitutes cruel is a matter of philosophy as much as it is something that can be determined by measuring stress hormones in a laboratory.

The animal rights brigade mean well, but they are victims of woolly thinking. What is good for a non-sentient species should over-ride what is good for a non-sentient individual, precisely because the individual creatures are not self-aware beings in the way we define ourselves.

This issue was always driven by politics, with science used as a fig leaf. I believe a sufficiently large Tory majority after 2015 will result in its repeal.