James Hannah

Dear J

Right. Fox hunt­ing. At a recent Invo­cal per­for­mance, a gen­tle­man stood up and recited a lit­tle poem about a fox hunt he had been on. “It’ll be con­tro­ver­sial, this,” he warned.

So it turned out. I lis­tened with some dis­com­fort to his descrip­tions of a friend of his called Colin writhing and pump­ing and puls­ing and sweat­ing and heav­ing beneath him.

If this is what fox hunting’s all about, no won­der mid­dle Eng­land is upping arms over it, I thought.

(Up in arms or upping arms — I pre­fer the lat­ter. It makes more sense.)

To take my mind off what­ever procla­ma­tions our poetic gen­tle­man saw fit to make in a pub­lic place, I got to pon­der­ing the rights and wrongs of fox hunt­ing. My work­ings are shown below:

Do I agree with fox hunt­ing?
Do I agree with the unnec­es­sary suf­fer­ing of ani­mals? [yes/no]
Are eco­nomic rea­sons good enough to cur­tail nat­ural order? [yes/no]
If yes: Must fox num­bers be kept down for eco­nomic rea­sons? [yes/no] (though I don’t have evi­dence)
If yes: Is hunt­ing the method that causes least suf­fer­ing in dis­patch­ing foxes? [yes/no] (I assume not)
If no: Is sport a good rea­son to use any­thing other than the ‘least suf­fer­ing’ method? [yes/no]
Result: I don’t agree with fox hunting.

As you can see, there are sev­eral areas that need water­tight evi­dence, but I’ve car­ried it through to my cur­rent con­clu­sion. Any­one could dis­agree with the idea that suf­fer­ing in ani­mals is a bad thing, I sup­pose, or that the econ­omy should over­rule the nat­ural order of things.

By the way, I needn’t have gone green at the gills at the poetry read­ing. Colin, it turns out, was our poet’s trusty steed. I wish he’d said that in the first place.

And I’m still not alto­gether sure that’s not worse…

jx