As the government’s consultation on so-called ‘trail hunting’ edges ever closer, the increasingly desperate Countryside Alliance have launched a scheme where new members can nominate a hunt to receive fifty pounds from CA coffers.
So, let’s have a look at what hunts supported by the Countryside Alliance scheme could do if they get nominated…
One of the packs that could benefit is the Devon-based Axe Vale Harriers. If just three Countryside Alliance members nominate them, they could buy themselves a brand-new terrier location collar from Bellman & Flint. This would allow them to continue to send hunt terriers into badger setts to attack terrified foxes, just as they did back in March last year.
Another hunt that can be nominated under the Countryside Alliance scheme is the Somerset-based Seavington, who have been convicted of illegal fox hunting three times. Fifty pounds would allow them to purchase a full season’s worth of high-quality sacks, ideal for bagging live foxes which can then be mutilated and tipped in front of the hounds, just as they did in March 2022.
If the Seavington find they have any spare sacks they could always donate them to another beneficiary of the Countryside Alliance scheme – the Cotswold Hunt. This pack take the practice of bagging foxes to a new level: they dig them out, put them in a sack, then bury them alive until needed for illegal hunting.
Finally – for now – if any Countryside Alliance member nominates the Blackmore & Sparkford Vale Hunt to receive fifty quid from their coffers, they could spend it on a much-needed hearing test for their huntsman George Pierce. In April 2025, he and three others were found guilty of illegal hunting, but only after Pierce had claimed in court that he couldn’t hear his own large pack of foxhounds in cry because of “cows mooing in a barn.”
Of course, all this desperate scheme really does is highlight the hypocrisy at the heart of the Countryside Alliance. One minute their CEO, Tim Bonner, is telling hunts to behave themselves in the run-up to the consultation, the next minute they’re concocting a scheme to prop-up fox baggers, fox buriers and fox hunters across the country. Truly, the idiots running the Countryside Alliance have more money than sense!
We are the only organisation that works directly in the field to save wildlife through direct action.
