“There’s A Brace!” – Avon Vale Hunt Filmed Throwing Two Foxes To Hounds

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!

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.