hunting

[Tim Kelly]

That is exactly how it should be nightwing. Unfortunately we have a society riddled with outdated class prejudice and There is a perception of hunting (and shooting for that matter) by the uninformed knuckle dragging general public is a "toff" sport and therefore should be banned in our brave new egalitarian world. Obviously this class prejudice is complete nonsense but it is something played on by the "antis" and the current government desperate for some popular support to cover their many other failings and appease the old class warriors within the party.

[Mally]

Thats brilliant nightwing if only people from with could stop stabbing each other in the back and support each other instead, i'm not saying everyone should take up fox hunting, but they should at least not slag it off.

[Adrian]

Miasma.

 

Thats the trouble, she was telling a basic truth, but with a very biased spin on it.

 

Rob.

 

Yeah, I heard the one about consultation too. I dont know if the govt are after a compromise or what. Others I have heard talk about 'full steam ahead for a ban.If a consultation takes 6 months, a total ban could be delivered in time to placate the Labour back benches, to take their mind off something else,like a war in Iraq perhaps??.

 

There seems to be a large number of professional 'busy bodies' in this country who need something to campaign about and possibly ban. They will not go away. They may turn on us, they may not. If they do, the experience may not be a comfortable one.

 

The safety in numbers argument is one I find comforting, I just hope it is right. An economist chap was on the radio talking about the economic impact of the loss of hunting. His line was "there will be none, the hunt employees will find new jobs, the hunters will spend their money on other things, opening up new opportunities". Suppose it could be applied to us as well.

 

I would be a lot more reassured by the politicians if rather than "we have no plans to ban Angling", they were to protect our right in statute, rather like the free fishing below Runnymede included in Magna Carta.

 

I may worry, but I just cannot trust politicians. Look what happened to the pistol shooters.

 

Cheers. Adrian

[Vagabond]

Nightwing is absolutely right. All country sports should stand together or we get picked off one by one. No true country sportsman/sportswoman should be making stupid snide remarks about "toff's on horseback"

 

My stepdaughter (a bank clerk) rides to hounds, my stepson (bricklayer) hunts with lurcher and ferrets. Several of my family shoot, nearly all fish. I participate (or have participated) in all three. None of us started with an inherited brass farthing, let alone a silver spoon.

 

Snobbery and inverse snobbery are a curse in Britain, something to do with accents - and we look down on countries riddled with a "caste" system!!

 

George W Bush probably has the same accent as his ranch-hand - perhaps that is why Americans can band together against the "antis" -

[Excalibur]

Thankyou Nightwing, that's two of us. Only two and a half million more to convince.

[miasma]

Not so sure about President Bush...his biographer

has suggested he go home for a little cultural

retraining...started to use "flouncy" Washington

words like "fabulous"!!

Be Lucky!....miasma..

[TheDacer]

Hey Phonebush!

 

I thought all you yanks were already rich!!??!?!

[phil hackett]

As some of you know my qualifications are in Environmental Studies, Ecology and Countryside Management. I have been an angler for over 40 years. I lived my childhood in the countryside and to some degree participated in so-called country sports.

As a young boy myself and a mate who was the son of a local farmer, would at this time of year, sit at the top of a bank and watch anything up to a dozen brown hare’s boxing in the field below us. At anytime of the year and on any day whilst in our natural playground the river valley, we could guarantee seeing at least 1 hare and perhaps 3 on a good day.

 

I still visit the same places today that I played in as a kid and little has change environmental to that river valley, if anything the habitat for brown hares has got somewhat better with more open grassland. However, there is one crucial difference, I no longer see any hares and the last one I saw was 10 years ago.

The area since I was a boy has been extensively coursed by lurchers, that much so, that the brown hare in this area is now extinct.

 

Do I want this to happen elsewhere? No I don’t! Do I want an end to this practice? Yes I do and the sooner the better. Not for any nostalgic reasons, but to save the dwindling biodiversity of areas like the above one where the populations of hares are on the brink of extinction.

 

That is why I will not as an angler and ecologist support the CA, because it ethos is to protect the rights of those people who could, and likely would, bring about the same fate to other areas as I’ve described above.

 

To me, that is totally unacceptable.

[Tim Kelly]

Phil

 

I go beating on a farm in Oxfordshire. It is classic hare and partridge country with big rolling fields. It is crawling with hares, but they have a huge problem with ILLEGAL coursing. Gangs of blokes come up from Wales and drive over fields, break gates and generally cause mayhem. The police are rarely interested in coming out to catch them and the law makes it almost impossible to convict them as you almost have to catch them with an armfull of hares and have watched a kill. Even then the courts give them tiny fines which they laugh at given the amount of money they gamble on each course.

 

ILLEGAL coursing is utterly indicriminate and may, as you describe, lead to the total destruction of a local hare population. LEGAL coursing, however would never cause the elimination of hares from an area because they would never course it to distruction as it would not be in their interests.

 

Any Sportsman or women cares passionately about their quarry, whether it's pike, barbel, hares, pheasants or whatever. Nobody would want to see their quarry eliminated and all have an enormous respect for the animal and it's environment. Vast areas of countryside are kept for the benefit of the animals rather than being put to the plough. Without sportsmen and women many species, not just the quarry, would have become extinct years ago. Properly managed land is far more productive than land abandoned to scrub and not cared about because nobody has a vested interest in it.

 

How many rivers have great fish populations and healthy ecosystems because of anglers? The exact same is true of the rest of the countryside when it's managed with somebobdy elses sport in mind.

Banning foxhunting, legal coursing etc will have a tangiable effect on our landscape. If you care about it, protect the protectors.

[Mally]

Couldn't have put it better myself!!!