Aniseed and Antis: CountryFile covers the Hunting Act!

This week sees the 20th anniversary of the enactment of the Hunting Act, an occasion marked by a special report on BBC’s Countryfile programme.

Viewers were treated to the sight of a hunt sab, an MP, and Assistant Chief Constable Matt Longman – National Police Lead for Hunting with Hounds – all agreeing that illegal fox hunting was “widespread” under the current Act.

On the other side, the hunters were reduced to fielding one Richard Gurney to put their case. Gurney is a master of the Crawley & Horsham – the country’s most convicted hunt – and was a leading contributor to the notorious Hunting Office ‘smokescreen’ webinars, exposed by the HSA in November 2020. In the webinar, Gurney presented a ‘case study’ – an example of best practice – on how trails should be laid when hunt sabs turn up. He stated that this practice is not:

“…about turning the Old Surrey, Burstow & West Kent into a trail laying pack, it was about giving us the support and protection that we needed…The Master of the day decided, that we should revert to Plan B, Plan B being obviously using our team to lay trails for the rest of the day because it became clear that the antis had arrived”.

These damning comments make it clear that trail-laying is a ‘Plan B’ held in reserve for when sabs turn up. And in his Countryfile piece, Gurney was no less shifty, claiming that the Crawley & Horsham use “aniseed and vegetable oil” to lay trails – an odd claim, given that we have been told for twenty years that trail hunting must involve a “quarry-based scent!”.

At another sequence filmed at the Fitzwilliam Hunt – which has twice been convicted of illegal foxhunting – the Countryfile production team got a taste of the routine aggression sabs put up with every week. Leading Fitzwilliam ‘steward’, the knobbly-kneed Andy Alexander, severely embarrassed himself by getting in the faces of the BBC camera crew and demanding to know their names!

The report ended with what sounded very much like a grovelling apology from the Fitzwilliam Hunt – a fitting end for an organisation that must know its days are numbered. As Countryfile acknowledged, the Hunt Saboteurs Association is leading the fight against hunting – please join us!