Catch up on recent news from the Hunt Saboteurs Association
Hunt sabs have been in action against mink hunts at opposite ends of the country this week. On Friday, sabs from across Yorkshire shut down a meet of the Northern Counties Hunt; yesterday, North Dorset sabs confronted the Courtenay Tracy Mink Hounds on the riverbank.
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (and we wouldn’t blame you!) you’ll know that there’s going to be a General Election on July 4th – a prospect that brings hope of real change to the deeply flawed Hunting Act.
Greg Baker, huntsman of the Carmarthenshire-based Llandeilo Farmers Hunt, was today sentenced to 20 weeks prison, suspended for 2 years, 150 hours of unpaid work plus a £150 surcharge after being found guilty of causing unnecessary suffering to a number of animals. He did not receive a disqualification. When the RSPCA raided Baker’s squalid property, […]
In Part 1 ‘Artificial Earths; A Year-Round Deception’, we covered the Spring and Summer months, which included the hunt’s preparation work out of season, and the rearing of fox cubs ready for the new hunting season. In Part 2, we will cover the use of artificial earths during the autumn and winter months, which coincides with the hunting season.
On Saturday 20th April 2024, sabs from across the country headed to Exmoor for a national hit on the Devon & Somerset Stag Hounds closing meet. Despite the best efforts of all sabs involved, the hunt tragically killed a stag who they had hunted to exhaustion. What the stag had endured up to this point was the horrific cruelty of stag hunting.
A barn full of old folks in bright waistcoats? A verge full of Sabs in their new black spring outfits? Mink hunt sabbing must be underway!
Last Saturday, multiple sab groups mobilised to disrupt the final meet of the Devon & Somerset Staghounds on Exmoor. While several deer were saved, sabs were unable to prevent the death of one stag who was hunted to exhaustion.
Following Channel 4’s recent national news coverage of the infamous ‘secret protocol’ between Warwickshire Police and the Warwickshire Hunt – together with a looming General Election and a stronger ban in Scotland – the enforceability of the Hunting Act for local police forces has very much been a hot topic.
Glasgow Hunt Saboteurs report on their first season under new hunting law in Scotland.
Last week, sabs from North Dorset spent three consecutive days in Bournemouth Crown Court giving evidence and victim statements. On Thursday 4th April, a jury unanimously found Charlie Mayo, a member of the Blackmore & Sparkford Vale Hunt (BSV), guilty of Actual Bodily Harm.
The use of artificial earths by hunts has been well documented by the Hunt Saboteurs Association. This is the practice of building underground chambers for foxes and in particular fox cubs, so that the hunt can keep a regular supply of quarry to hunt. Like so many other hunting traditions, this did not stop when hunting with hounds was banned in 2005.
With the fox and hare hunting now ending for the season, a hardcore of bloodsports enthusiasts are about to take to watercourses to follow their summer hunts, and hunt sabs are poised to stop them!
More drama this week as the Avon Vale implosion is still being dragged out before the courts. This time, it was the turn of Tom Ledbury, an Avon Vale Hunt terrierman, who was sentenced this week to a 12 month community order requiring him to carry out 240 hours of unpaid work, for his role in a video which surfaced last year following raids conducted by RSPCA and police officers around the country including hunt kennels and the homes of ‘terriermen’.
If you’ve turned on the TV to see a hunting-related story over the past few years, it’s almost certainly been about one of the many illegal acts or animal cruelty offences carried out by hunts and the fanatics that follow them.
A piece like this can never do justice to the week-in, week-out efforts of sabs who venture out in all weathers to face down the hunters. We can’t cover, for example, the 58 hunt meets that Nottingham sabs have attended this season, nor the 55 times Salisbury Plain sabs went out to protect the wildlife of their beloved Plain. What we can do is focus on just a few highlights from the last full hunting season before a much-anticipated General Election.
With the 2023/24 fox and hare hunting season coming to an end, it’s clear that despite being banned from using huge swathes of land across the country, hunts are still doing just that.
When the fox hunting old guard were scrambling to explain what they’d be doing after the Hunting Act came into force into 2005, they were keen to make sure everyone knew just how pointless “trail hunting” was, and how urgently they wanted to get back to the good old days of killing foxes legally.
I don’t really have ambitions , I don’t like generating expectations, but there are two things that I would like to see happen before I pop my clogs. One, the end of the fur trade . . . and two, an end to fox hunting. From my perspective they are both vile. Small word vile, but powerful, and it completely encapsulates my contempt and loathing for those who deliberately perpetuate animal cruelty.
Over the weekend hunt sabs got the latest glimpse into the dying world of the hare-hunting basset and beagle packs.
Police Chief Matthew Longman called for a review of the Hunting Act in a recent Channel 4 exposé into Warwickshire Police’s secret protocol with the local hunt. ‘The Hunting Act is going to need reform, and to close some of these loopholes which are continually being exploited,’ said Longman.
