September 26, 2004
Tally-Ho
I can still remember the morning, when, as a child, I was sent down to the chicken coop on our farm to collect eggs. It was a chore I liked doing since, being too young to understand the biological source of eggs, I regarded their appearance under the hens as somewhat magical. Anyway, when I got to the coop, I was met with a ghostly silence (ghostly if you were a chicken, that is). The thirty-plus hens were dead, all killed by a bite to the neck. The culprit was no mystery – there were plenty of foxes in the area, and one of them had dug under the wire protecting the pen. In the wild, foxes will kill as much as they can (to bury or eat later), so rather than killing one hen and making off with it, it was curtains for them all.
There’s been a bit of talk about fox-hunting in the media here in the last week or so, ever since it became clear that the British government signalled their intent to ban hunting with hounds. There was a couple of rather predictable debates on “Mooney goes Wild on One” (Radio 1’s wildlife programme on Saturday mornings) and on RTE’s Question & Answers programme. Whatever views one has on hunting, let’s lay a couple of tired old arguments to rest. First of all, as a means of culling foxes, hunting with hounds is about as efficient as training a bunch of monkeys on unicycles to hunt them down. Hauling a bunch of horses and dogs by trailers and horseboxes across the countryside to go looking for foxes in broad daylight is about the least effective way of hunting foxes. Secondly, whatever about the argument that foxes kill lambs in the spring, no farmer in his right mind would address that problem by unleashing a pack of baying hounds and thundering horses through his fields to protect the self-same lambs.
Farmers and landowners have been culling foxes the same way for years - with Point-22 rifles and high-beam lights. At night, the foxes look into the beams, their eyes reflect the light in the dark and BANG (whose cunning now?). And that is how culling should be done / quickly, efficiently and as painlessly as possible. In the forests near my home, there is currently a cull of wild deer in process. They are breeding like rabbits, and are slowly but surely destroying the trees by “ringing” the barks (i.e. eating the bark right around the tree). The cull will be done, not with horses and dogs, but with guns. I still feel sorry for them – I’ve seen Bambi – but at least the job will be done humanely.
It’s been a few years since I’ve spent an afternoon on a horse but I never once dismounted thinking that the day out would have been somehow enhanced if I’d managed to kill a fox too. And that is what the pro hunting with hounds lobby seem afraid to say openly – that when you strip away the bogus arguments of culling and helping the farmers, the difference is that they enjoy the thrill of the kill.
Mind you, it‘s not like people in Ireland are getting too excited about the issue. It’s only if a bunch of English toffs decide to come to Ireland to do their hunting that the debate will heat up.
Posted by Monasette at September 26, 2004 09:16 PM