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Quote: from highflyer1 on 10:38 am on Sep. 16, 2004[br]<br>I know quite a few people who hunt and when I ask them if they would go drag hunting in the event of a ban they say "I doubt it, just wouldn’t be the same without the thrill of the kill."
Sadists one and all. Have no sympathy for them! <br>
Yep, I’ve heard this any number of times, particularly from the people I queried on the matter during my only recently-completed five years working in an intrinsically public post in rural North Yorkshire (a more hunt-saturated part of the world you could barely imagine, yet one in which – if you scratch away at the surface – a surprisingly large number of people are uncomfortable with the concept of ANY hunting continuing).
When I suggested to the pro-hunters that drag hunting would be a perfectly adequate substitute, the response was usually that it wouldn’t be the same, there’d be no kill, no random element, and besides which, the modifying of a sport in such a way would be utterly unprecedented….
…which of course it wouldn’t. Were that the case, we’d still be heading those ludicrously heavy leather footballs from the 1950s and 1960s and enjoying the head injuries they engendered. We’d still be having amateur boxing matches without head guards and wondering why so many young men still in their teens were getting really, really badly hurt. We’d still be running horseraces with wooden or concrete rails and non-collapsible hurdle / fence wings. Any riders who had not been smacked into such an immovable object after the final obstacle would then have the opportunity to force his or her mount home with a non-cushioned, hard impact whip rather than today’s more humane equivalent.
The point is this; as we have become more civilised over time, so we have felt the need to revisit numerous sports and make them safer for its participants (human or animal) and in keeping with newer / more prevailing sensibilities. Hunting has no cause to presume it can remain immune to such potential intervention for all eternity.
Jeremy<br>
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Quote: from insomniac on 7:33 pm on Sep. 15, 2004[br]<br> This is a liberty being removed because of class bigotry, not because of any deep seated concern over animal welfare,
One thing you can be sure of though is that if fox-hunting was the pastime of gays, muslims or jews no action would have been taken against it by our Labour bigots.
<br>Forgive me if I don’t dignify your bileous closing comment with a longer reply. However, you may be right in identifying some sort of class element to the whole affair, which is why I would not ban the ACT of hunting, merely what is being hunted.
Stopping (mostly) posh people bombing around the countryside on horseback outright – even if, as will eventually happen, they are following nothing more harmful than the trail of an aniseed-impregnated hankie – would simply be an inverted equivalent of posh people wanting boxing banning because the thought of two rough lads punching each other’s heads in is unbecoming behaviour. Frankly neither is any more or less deserving of censure than the other.
Jeremy<br>
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Quote: from robertylea on 6:04 pm on Sep. 15, 2004[br]
1.  What’s going to happen with the fox population – how will it be controlled?<br>2.  What’s going to happen to ex-racehorses, who may well go point-to-pointing or hunting after their career is over?  Responsibility for these animals must be taken.
<br>a ban on foxhunting will only affect the horse population, PTP calendar etc. if the members of hunts are too pig-headed to accept what is being offered, namely the ability to continue as draghunts without further censure. The likes of Mid Surrey Farmers already operates (part / all of the time?) as a draghunt, and it is in that guise that its PTP takes place every year. Simply expect to see more of the same.
If there ARE any real concerns about the fox population post-ban, I do not see why the earthstoppers, or whoever it is that drives the animals out of the ground, cannot instead develop a symbiotic relationship with their local vets – they could be employed to catch the foxes as they leave their burrows instead, and bring them to the vets for sterilisation before being released back into the wild, thereby ensuring a tempering of numbers with no death or needless suffering whatsoever. I defy anyone to tell me how this cannot work.
Jeremy<br>
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Quote: from Ian Davies on 3:20 pm on Sep. 15, 2004[br]Paradoxically, perhaps, I’m anti-hunting but love point-to-point, which is essentially there as a fundraiser for hunting.
You’re not alone, I also love PTPs and wouldn’t even mind commentating on one at some point in my life, but I’ll be jiggered if I’ll let anyone take that to mean I approve of what its hosts actually get up to the rest of the year.
I’m already looking forward to my annual trip up to Charm Park in Scarborough for the Stainton PTP in March, but not some of the characters / mindsets I’ll have to encounter once there.
Jeremy<br>
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Quote: from phunter on 3:16 pm on Sep. 15, 2004[br]<br>With many folk against fox hunting who actually go racing i don’t see this as being a good idea, if they want to protest fair enough, but they shouldn’t be involving racing with it IMO, there are marches elsewhere for this.<br>
Absolutely. The presumption that all racegoers are pro-hunting is spectacularly misguided. It reminds me a bit of that line from Monty Python’s logician sketch, “Alma Cogan is dead, but not all dead people are Alma Coganâ€ÂÂ
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
Hiya,
Another suggestion which has been floated around the F1 paddocks recently is to have qualifying consisting of two mini-races of 10 laps each, the grid positions of which would be determined by numbers out of a hat. Whatever tyre / fuel set-up is started with would have to last the driver into the race proper on the Sunday.
Ecclestone is apparently quite keen on the idea as it seems (marginally) less of a punishment of good drivers than simply flipping the grid round such that the last in qualifying is first on the grid and vice versa. The teams are much less keen!
Jeremy
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.
