The private schools schooling children in a masterclass of wildlife criminality.
Recently we revealed the full footage of the Stowe School Beagles during what school headteacher, Dr Anthony Wallersteiner, describes as a “huge variety of activities” available to pupils, including “field games…beagling”.
The school’s Games Coach, Phillip Kennedy, was in the fields surrounding Crockwell Farm, alongside school pupils, ‘coaching’ them as the Stowe School Beagles hunted a hare.
The school lesson ended with a dead hare and a criminal conviction for its Games Coach.
Kennedy pleaded guilty to hunting a wild mammal with dogs after drone footage captured his pack chasing the hare, first through the farmyard and then across open fields before catching and killing her against a fence. Police said that Kennedy knew allowing his dogs to chase and kill the hare was cruel and illegal.
Just as importantly, the footage shone a spotlight on something that has gone on behind the closed doors of some of Britain’s most prestigious private schools: children being introduced to illegal hunting, more than twenty years after hunting wild mammals with dogs was banned.
There are serious safeguarding questions which Stowe School, in particular, appear determined to ignore. What risk assessments are made before children are taken out with packs of hunting dogs? What are staff instructed to do when those hounds begin pursuing a live animal? What safeguarding procedures kick in when pupils witness that animal being caught and killed?
Nothing in the footage suggests this was some unexpected aberration. They all know the routine, the kids congratulate each other, congratulate the dogs. Nobody looks shocked. The huntsman joins in with the handshaking. They’ve clearly done this before haven’t they!
Stowe is not alone.
There are other school beagle packs still taking children out into the countryside, maintaining the hounds and traditions of hare hunting.
Eton College has one of the oldest and most famous school beagle packs in the country.
Its history stretches back to the nineteenth century. Long before the Hunting Act, generations of Eton boys learned their “hound lore” by pursuing hares with the school pack. Boys became Masters and Whips, and learned to handle hounds.
The Hunting Act came into force in 2005, but school lessons in hare-hunting continue.
In 2013, eight years after the ban, the Hunt Saboteurs Association revealed plans for a Young Hare-Hunters’ Day at Eton. This was no historical re-enactment of hunting, children were actually being offered coaching in the skills and traditions of hare hunting.
Pupils were to receive training in hare hunting from experienced huntsmen, including Steven Duckmanton, the huntsman of the Dummer Beagles.
In 2024, West Midlands Hunt Saboteurs put a drone above those same Dummer Beagles. The footage they captured showed a hare breaking from the field and the pack pursuing her line across field after field, whilst hunt staff watched.
In October 2015, footage was filmed at an Eton College Beagles meet in North Yorkshire, which showed a live hare fleeing across a field with the pack in pursuit. The footage was handed to North Yorkshire Police in January 2016 and Eton announced an urgent investigation.
Eleven years after hunting with dogs had supposedly been consigned to history, one of Britain’s most prestigious schools was having to investigate its own beagle pack over footage of a hare being hunted.
This year, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg revealed his eldest son had brought 41 Eton beagles home with him during the school holidays.
His son, Peter Theodore Aphege Rees-Mogg, left Eton this summer. He wasn’t a mere follower of the hunt – he had been a Master of the Eton College Hunt during his final year.
Peter’s mother Helena, herself a regular fox hunter and meet host for the recently-charged Mendip Farmers Hunt, went even further in an article published in September 2026.
Writing about why she believes Eton should remain an all-boys school, Helen recounted Peter’s argument that it allowed boys the freedom to charge around the countryside in tweed after the beagles, without having to worry about looking cool in front of girls. If girls were admitted, he feared they might struggle to persuade boys to go beagling at all.
It’s all presented as wonderfully eccentric. Hounds, tweed and tradition and schoolboys charging across the countryside. How very quaint. If only it wasn’t for the criminal and barbaric animal cruelty at the centre of it, maybe we could all get behind this.
It’s not just Stowe and Eton either, then there is Radley College.
Radley has also educated its fair share of the establishment, one example most recently is James, Earl of Wessex, the son of Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh, who left the school this summer for the Royal Agricultural University, home to the RAC Beagles.
In January 2025, Severn Vale Hunt Saboteurs had an encounter with the Radley College near Pidnell Farm, Radcot. Sabs arrived to find the pack hunting across open fields, hounds giving voice on the scent of a hare. Sabs intervened, the hunt packed up, putting the hounds in the van as sabs watched on.
After an altercation with aggressive hunt supporters, the sabs returned to their vehicle.
So far, just another day sabbing a beagle pack…right?
Then something extraordinary happened. Thames Valley Police arrived in force, including armed police and a dog unit. Police seized the sabs’ cameras, clothing and other property, as well as their vehicle, before arresting all four saboteurs.
All four saboteurs were held overnight. Ultimately, every case against them was dropped.
Hunt saboteurs are no strangers to police turning up at hunts, nor to seeing significant police resources deployed against those trying to stop illegal hunting.
But even by those standards, this was different. Severn Vale sabs describes the police response as unprecedented, that leaves us all asking an obvious question. Was someone important at the Radley College Beagles that day?
The Royal Family has a long and close relationship with school beagling. The Queen Mother had a decades long relationship with the Eton College Beagles, entertaining the boys and their hounds at Royal Lodge from 1972. In fact, one of her final engagements before her death in 2002 was an Eton Beagles lawn meet at Royal Lodge.
Eton’s own records state that its last hunt for live quarry took place in Windsor Great Park on 18 February 2005 – the very day the Hunting Act came into force.
But of course as we know, that wasn’t their last day hunting for live quarry at all.
An HSA spokesperson said
“This isn’t just about a handful of school beagle packs clinging to an outdated tradition. These are children being introduced into the culture of hunting wildlife with dogs, which has been illegal for over 20 years.
What happened at Stowe happens at beagle packs around the country, including other school packs. Where is the safeguarding, and why are adults able to groom children into this specific type of animal abuse with no alarm bells ringing?”
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