Bring Back Fox Hunting

Originally Posted by Sirius

If the fox has to be culled then fine, do it with a gun not by dogs so that the people watching can

A. look on it as a sport.

B. Get some perverse pleasure from the act.

Why do a bunch of people have to chase the fox into the ground whilst making a sport and spectacle out of it. I would love to post a link to some of the videos of those people screaming and shouting and having a laugh at the death of an animal but i will not because it will upset people who may not have seen what its like in the first place.

A farmer with his shotgun can do it with less stress to the animal. However there is no fun or sport in that

Why do you care how total strangers derive pleasure? What business of yours is it in any case?

As others have said, the assertion that death by shotgun is better from an animal welfare point of view is contested. Anything less than a clean kill results in prolonged suffering to the animal. The shotgun can also make no distinction between the stronger and weaker animals. Chasing down foxes with dogs offers the possibility that the stronger animals survive while the weaker are killed, which is better for the species. This may not be the reason the hunters do it, but it is nevertheless the case.

Originally Posted by Chris

Why do you care how total strangers derive pleasure? What business of yours is it in any case?

As others have said, the assertion that death by shotgun is better from an animal welfare point of view is contested. Anything less than a clean kill results in prolonged suffering to the animal. The shotgun can also make no distinction between the stronger and weaker animals. Chasing down foxes with dogs offers the possibility that the stronger animals survive while the weaker are killed, which is better for the species. This may not be the reason the hunters do it, but it is nevertheless the case.

Many moons ago total strangers derived pleasure (some still do) from dog fighting ,society grew up and made it illegal because of the cruelty factor ,the same ideals have been applied to fox hunting

Originally Posted by Sirius

If the fox has to be culled then fine, do it with a gun not by dogs so that the people watching can

A. look on it as a sport.

B. Get some perverse pleasure from the act.

Why do a bunch of people have to chase the fox into the ground whilst making a sport and spectacle out of it. I would love to post a link to some of the videos of those people screaming and shouting and having a laugh at the death of an animal but i will not because it will upset people who may not have seen what its like in the first place.

A farmer with his shotgun can do it with less stress to the animal. However there is no fun or sport in that

they should either invest or the gov should give grants to help cover costs of protecting land

http://www.electricfencing.co.uk/foxes.asp

Originally Posted by Damien

Hang on. It's not that arbitrary . We're not simply projecting our feelings onto animals. We've feeling empathy for them, they're living creatures and we can relate to feelings of suffering that they may feel. Surely it's borderline psychopathic if we didn't feel such empathy for them. I also think it's rather patronising, albeit quite funny, to suggest that this phenomenon is confined to a Disneyfied view of the world where they sing and dance for us.

I admit there is a degree of hypocrisy to the fact I am not a vegetarian which I mostly get away with because the killing is abstracted away from me but also because I try not to buy products where the animal suffers and because I view the use of some animals for food as ethical different to killing them for sport.

Anyway unlike four years ago I probably wouldn't oppose this ban being lifted. Not because I think fox hunting is a good thing but because I dislike the idea of the Government passing laws and criminalising people unless there is a really good reason to so. My own view of the ethicality of Fox Hunting is certainly not a good enough reason.

However we've had this discussion before haven't we? I am surprised you're arguing about arbitrary morality and illiberal legislation because I think that we were on opposite sides of this debate when it came to Gay Marriage. Unless I misunderstood your position (which is possible) you were against the legalisation of it because of your own moral code whereas I was both for it in terms of morality but also believed that it wasn't the Governments place to enforce your/their morality on other people. What's the difference between the Government enforcing someone's moral view of Fox Hunting and the Government enforcing someone else's moral view of Marriage? Surely you already accept there is a such a thing as morality derived from a 'higher power'. Be it God or empathy for animals.

You throw terms like "borderline psychopathic" around far too freely. It simply shows a severe lack of awareness of your own culture's history and development. You can't, at a stroke, classify whole swathes of the past and present population of these islands as "borderline psychopathic" just because you find their behaviour distasteful.

And you say you're not simply reading your own feelings on to animals while at the same time saying you want to "relate to suffering they may feel" .... "may" being the operative word here. You don't know, so what feelings are you assuming to be at play? Can you put yourself into the mind of a fox, or can you in fact only ever hope to put yourself in the mind of a person trying to imagine what it might be like to be a fox? No amount of method acting is going to get you close to understanding what being an animal is like, not least because animals lack a sense of self which would enable them even to decide for themselves how they feel.

The read-across to the gay marriage debate is, I believe, the opposite of what you have suggested. Marriage as an institution predates our culture and our legislature. Until the 18th century you could be married without relying on any statute at all: the phrase "common law wife/husband" is only now beginning to fall out of common parlance, despite it having been legislated away centuries ago.

All over the world, throughout history, human societies have recognised a lifetime pairing between one man and one woman. In a small part of the world, at one particular moment in history, a few states with a common, largely post-religious, materialist philosophical outlook, have sought not simply to extend a legal privilege - reform to the civil partnerships laws could have achieved that - but to legislate against an ancient belief, still current in most of the world, regarding what marriage, fundamentally, is. If you think that is not what is proposed, then bookmark this thread and we'll take up the discussion the first time Stonewall finds a test case to take to the ECHR.

I digress.

I should make a point about your conflating arbitrary morality and religious belief. Again, that's a myopic position to hold; the judgments of right and wrong that an individual makes for himself are simply not on the same philosophical plane as the external, absolute truth claimed by any of the world's major religions, whether or not you believe in the God that stands behind them. Even taken as mere philosophies of life, they have been around for millennia and have survived the rise and fall of empires , and will survive the fall of ours. Arbitrary morality, it isn't.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Chris

The fatal flaw in the slavers' argument was of course that the slaves actually were human. They lost the argument on their own terms, once it was widely understood that human slaves were being treated with less dignity than their humanity demanded.

The question now is whether the treatment of a hunted fox is less than that demanded by its status as a fox. Leaving aside the fact that animals have no status in law - our laws being framed in terms of what people can and cannot do to animals, rather than what "rights" animals have - I would argue that a fox being hunted down by a pack of dogs, even being "torn to pieces" by that pack, is receiving no different treatment than it could have expected in the wild, had humans themselves not removed the apex predators such as wolves and eagle owls (though these are, I believe, beginning to make a comeback).

I have no doubt that the fox is distressed by the hunt. I have no doubt that its death is painful. However it is suffering nothing that is not routinely suffered by all wildlife, everywhere, every day. The argument that it is cruel does not stand up. Life is cruel. Death is cruel. You can't legislate against that.

What we're actually left with is people projecting their own feelings on to animals - a phenomenon pretty much confined to the cosseted, urbanised, Disneyfied Western world, where animals dress up in waistcoats to sing and dance for our entertainment, and meat is a mysterious pink substance that magically appears in shrink wrap on supermarket shelves - and arbitrary morality such as that articulated by Damien earlier: it's wrong because "it just is". All of which is fine as far as it goes. But to then legislate for that is as illiberal as legislating that everyone must be in church on Sunday morning.

And it's nothing at all like the smoking ban, which isn't a ban at all - simply a restriction on where you can smoke, enacted not for the benefit of the smoker but as a health and safety measure intended to protect those who work in public spaces and therefore don't have the choice to avoid passive inhalation.

I've already reppred Chris in this thread.

But his argument and logic is flawless.

---------- Post added at 13:44 ---------- Previous post was at 13:40 ----------

Originally Posted by martyh

If you are saying that hunts are using eagles to kill the foxes then fine ,it certainly is a lot more natural and civilized than setting a pack of dogs onto it ,

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Originally Posted by Chris

You throw terms like "borderline psychopathic" around far too freely. It simply shows a severe lack of awareness of your own culture's history and development. You can't, at a stroke, classify whole swathes of the past and present population of these islands as "borderline psychopathic" just because you find their behaviour distasteful.

I don't 'throw it around' too easily. However an inability to empathise with an animals suffering is an apt time to use it. A lack of empathy is a classic trait of psychopathy. I put borderline because it applies to an animal and not a human. I am not classifying them as borderline psychopathic either, just the act of not empathising, I don't know how they feel when they see the fox in pain.

And you say you're not simply reading your own feelings on to animals while at the same time saying you want to "relate to suffering they may feel" .... "may" being the operative word here. You don't know, so what feelings are you assuming to be at play? Can you put yourself into the mind of a fox, or can you in fact only ever hope to put yourself in the mind of a person trying to imagine what it might be like to be a fox? No amount of method acting is going to get you close to understanding what being an animal is like, not least because animals lack a sense of self which would enable them even to decide for themselves how they feel.

I don't know what being a fox is like but we can tell when an animal is in distress and in pain. We feel those sensations as well. We share some of our base experiences with animals such as fear and pain. They can't think or rationalise it but they certainly do feel it. It's those experiences that allow us to emphasise with other species. Even more so when we get to the more intelligent animals.

The read-across to the gay marriage debate is, I believe, the opposite of what you have suggested. Marriage as an institution predates our culture and our legislature. Until the 18th century you could be married without relying on any statute at all: the phrase "common law wife/husband" is only now beginning to fall out of common parlance, despite it having been legislated away centuries ago.

All over the world, throughout history, human societies have recognised a lifetime pairing between one man and one woman. In a small part of the world, at one particular moment in history, a few states with a common, largely post-religious, materialist philosophical outlook, have sought not simply to extend a legal privilege - reform to the civil partnerships laws could have achieved that - but to legislate against an ancient belief, still current in most of the world, regarding what marriage, fundamentally, is. If you think that is not what is proposed, then bookmark this thread and we'll take up the discussion the first time Stonewall finds a test case to take to the ECHR.

I don't want to digress too much either. Still from my point of view you're suggesting the Government continues to block what two people do that doesn't involve yourself. Not everyone believes a marriage should be between a man and a woman and should instead be between two individuals. We believe the definition should be updated.

I should make a point about your conflating arbitrary morality and religious belief. Again, that's a myopic position to hold; the judgments of right and wrong that an individual makes for himself are simply not on the same philosophical plane as the external, absolute truth claimed by any of the world's major religions, whether or not you believe in the God that stands behind them. Even taken as mere philosophies of life, they have been around for millennia and have survived the rise and fall of empires , and will survive the fall of ours. Arbitrary morality, it isn't.

Why is a morality derived from a belief in a deity/philosophy any more valid than one derived from an internal sense of right and wrong? We have empathy and a conscience that helps inform that morality and if you're an atheist (like me!) you believe that religious teachings of right and wrong come from man's internal sense of morality anyway.

It's getting a big abstract here anyway. I think the gay marriage thing is not too different to the fox hunting thing: Should a Government ban things that you're morally against if it causes no harm to others? Although there are probably extremes you could take thatargument too.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Chris

As others have said, the assertion that death by shotgun is better from an animal welfare point of view is contested. Anything less than a clean kill results in prolonged suffering to the animal. .

This is true, a shot gun is not a "hunting rifle". To kill with a shot gun you have to be fairly close range.

Also as you know, shot guns don't contain bullets, they contain shot, pellets, that disperse when fired. Depending how accurate you want to be decides the size and no. of pellets in the cartridge.

It is quite probably that a fox shot at by a shot gun, unless standing right over it, could be hit several times by the pellets in various places but not killed and in fact may even be able to escape and crawl in to hide somewhere. where it would bleed to death and in pain.

Also, I live in the countryside, have done for 5 years, never seen a fox. Heard them at night, found their faeces in my garden and in the surrounding fields, but never seen one.

Because, of course, they're nocturnal. Now, do you think a farmer or gamekeeper walks around at night with night vision goggles looking for foxes to kill on the off chance he runs into one???????

No, they don't, they set traps and snares. So the fox is trapped by a snare it struggles all night in vain to escape panicing, damaging itself in the process. It could be there days, then if it hasn't died a miserable death already, the farmer turns up and shoots it.

If I was a fox, I know what which way I'd prefer to go.

Originally Posted by Pierre

This is true, a shot gun is not a "hunting rifle". To kill with a shot gun you have to be fairly close range.

Also as you know, shot guns don't contain bullets, they contain shot, pellets, that disperse when fired. Depending how accurate you want to be decides the size and no. of pellets in the cartridge.

It is quite probably that a fox shot at by a shot gun, unless standing right over it, could be hit several times by the pellets in various places but not killed and in fact may even be able to escape and crawl in to hide somewhere. where it would bleed to death and in pain.

Also, I live in the countryside, have done for 5 years, never seen a fox. Heard them at night, found their faeces in my garden and in the surrounding fields, but never seen one.

Because, of course, they're nocturnal. Now, do you think a farmer or gamekeeper walks around at night with night vision goggles looking for foxes to kill on the off chance he runs into one???????

No, they don't, they set traps and snares. So the fox is trapped by a snare it struggles all night in vain to escape panicing, damaging itself in the process. It could be there days, then if it hasn't died a miserable death already, the farmer turns up and shoots it.

If I was a fox, I know what which way I'd prefer to go.

If that's how your farmer buddies are doing then they are doing it wrong .If a snare is set correctly then the animal will die quickly

Because, of course, they're nocturnal. Now, do you think a farmer or gamekeeper walks around at night with night vision goggles looking for foxes to kill on the off chance he runs into one???????

No ,they walk around in the daylight to the set and destroy it ,if there are foxes in it at the time then they will kill them .

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by martyh

If that's how your farmer buddies are doing then they are doing it wrong .If a snare is set correctly then the animal will die quickly

Wrong, snares are not designed to kill. they are designed to trap and hold the fox.

The law requires that snares should be checked at least once a day and and as soon after dawn as is practical is recommended.

However, I know that some may left for several days before they are checked.

No ,they walk around in the daylight to the set and destroy it ,if there are foxes in it at the time then they will kill them .

Do they? and how do they destroy the set and kill the fox's inside?

Originally Posted by Pierre

Wrong, snares are not designed to kill. they are designed to trap and hold the fox.

The law requires that snares should be checked at least once a day and and as soon after dawn as is practical is recommended.

However, I know that some may left for several days before they are checked.



Do they? and how do they destroy the set and kill the fox's inside?

I'm not going into the ins and outs of setting a snare(it's many years since i did that, and not very successfully then) .At the end of the day fox hunting is illegal and it will remain illegal .We are an advanced society and have more humane ways to control pests .Hunts have grown in popularity since the ban ,more foxes are being killed so what is the problem ?

The problem is, the simple, straightforward version of the hunt remains illegal, due to an illiberal piece of legislation that took up mountains more parliamentary time than it was worth, and animal "rights" activists are using that legislation as an excuse to engage in surveillance in an attempt to criminalise ordinary people for pursuing a pastime they previously did legally, as did generations of their ancestors. That, incidentally, includes the RSPCA, which is increasingly throwing hundreds of thousands of pounds raised by ordinary, well-meaning animal lovers in politically-motivated prosecutions, many of which have been so incompetently brought that they are failing in any case.

The fox hunting ban is very difficult to prosecute under, has not reduced fox killings and has not reduced hunt participation. It is bad law. Bad law has no place on the statute book.

Out of interest would you also unban dog fighting?

Originally Posted by Chris

The problem is, the simple, straightforward version of the hunt remains illegal, due to an illiberal piece of legislation that took up mountains more parliamentary time than it was worth, and animal "rights" activists are using that legislation as an excuse to engage in surveillance in an attempt to criminalise ordinary people for pursuing a pastime they previously did legally, as did generations of their ancestors. That, incidentally, includes the RSPCA, which is increasingly throwing hundreds of thousands of pounds raised by ordinary, well-meaning animal lovers in politically-motivated prosecutions, many of which have been so incompetently brought that they are failing in any case.

The fox hunting ban is very difficult to prosecute under, has not reduced fox killings and has not reduced hunt participation. It is bad law. Bad law has no place on the statute book.

Chris ,it was never intended to reduce fox killings or reduce the hunt participation ,it was intended to remove the intended animal cruelty and gratification of that cruelty in much the same way as dog fighting was made illegal ,making people criminals who had before been engaging in a sport and had done for generations

[danielf]

Originally Posted by Damien

Out of interest would you also unban dog fighting?

And what about sheep shagging?

Originally Posted by Damien

Out of interest would you also unban dog fighting?

An activity in which dogs are trained (brutalised) to act contrary to their nature, in unnatural surroundings? I can see what you're trying to do, but you're trying to categorise everything under the heading "sports where animals get hurt" when I would argue "sports where animals do what they do" would be nearer the mark so far as fox hunting is concerned. And dog fighting doesn't fit that category.

Animals fight, that's natural, but they have a flight response as well as a fight response in any given situation and that it both beaten out of them and also physically barred from them in a fighting pit. Likewise for cock fighting, especially when the birds are tooled up with blades on their feet.

I might just as well ask if you would seek to ban angling.