© 2024 Hunt Saboteurs Association
Following the HSA’s devastating exposure of the Axe Vale Harriers digging out a fox, we have been passed new video showing the Wrexham-based Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn Hunt using terriers to locate foxes in a badger sett.
In the covert footage – taken in November 2023 at Barton, Cheshire – two hunt employees, kennel huntsman Hartley Crouch and terrierman Ryan Brennan, are seen approaching the sett with a terrier dog.
Crouch puts the terrier into the sett then tracks their underground movements using a receiver device linked to a locator on the dog’s collar. Once the dog is retrieved from the sett, Crouch can be seen checking the animal’s face for bite marks. Brennan then casually blocks up the sett to prevent any hunted foxes seeking refuge later in the day.
This is far from the first time the Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn Hunt – also known as the Wynnstay – has been caught red-handed. They have been convicted of blocking active badger setts, as well as illegal fox hunting only last year as a result of further footage captured by the HSA.
Terriermen are essential to the practice of illegal foxhunting. Their role – as so clearly seen in the video – is to block known badger setts and other underground refuges to ensure that foxes are trapped above ground before a hunt. This means that the hunted fox is forced to run on, thereby providing the long chase demanded by the hunt’s paying subscribers. If a hunted fox does manage to find sanctuary in an unblocked hole, the pitiless terriermen either use their dogs to bolt the animal to the hounds or dig them out as seen in the Axe Vale video.
The HSA’s Investigations Officer commented:
“This video only adds to the tsunami of evidence that so-called trail hunts are behaving exactly as they did before the 2004 Hunting Act. It goes without saying that terriermen such as Crouch and Brennan have no place on a ‘trail hunt’ and that the Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn Hunt are constantly engaged in illegal fox hunting. We urgently need the new government to act on their manifesto commitment to ban trail hunting, end terrierwork and close the Hunting Act’s many loopholes.”
Further Reading
Axe Vale Video Exposes the Horror of ‘Terrier Work’ – Hunt Saboteurs Association (huntsabs.org.uk)
We are the only organisation that works directly in the field to save wildlife through direct action.