National Trail Hunting Day – The Dog That Didn’t Bark

About a year ago, the British Hound Sports Association announced that it would hold a ‘National Trail Hunting Day’. They promised their gullible supporters that this country-wide spectacle would “start to change minds” and go on to “dominate the news agenda.”

From the outset the HSA – who quickly dubbed it ‘Smokescreen Saturday’ – predicted that the event would be an expensive and embarrassing failure.

And so it proved.

Their first mistake was to appoint two hardcore hunters – Juian Barnfield and Richard Tyacke – as national organisers of the event.

In 2012, Barnfield pleaded guilty to four separate counts of unlawfully hunting a fox while huntsman of the Heythrop Hunt, while Tyacke was a leading contributor to the infamous Hunting Office ‘smokescreen’ webinars. Not exactly the characters you want heading-up an event designed to show the ‘legitimacy’ of so-called trail hunting.

Their second mistake was to allow every organisational cockup – and there were many – to play out in real time on the amateurish BHSA website. For example, when the East Devon Foxhounds were confirmed as hosting the Devon event, the BHSA used the what3words app to state that the location as: struggling with venue. The HSA speculated at the time that either the hunters had been unable to secure a venue for their event in the supposed hunting heartland of Devon, or it really was to going to be held at struggling.with.venue, a location deep in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, approximately 800 kilometres west of Western Sahara, a disputed territory claimed by both Morocco and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. In the mad world of the BHSA, both explanations seemed equally plausible.

Comedy gold: this venue wasn’t the only thing they struggled with.

As the countdown to the big day continued, so too did the PR gaffes. For weeks, the advert for the Cornwall event was entirely blank, while the Devon event (them, again!) helpfully advised viewers that the speaker for the event would be a “speaker”, and that interviews to the press would be provided by “interviewees”. And they imagined that busy journalists would give up their Saturday to attend this shitshow?

Good to know: the organiser will be an “organiser.”

Both of these were an improvement on the Hertfordshire advert, which appeared to rely heavily on the talents of Countryside Alliance CEO Tim Bonner, without, it seems, bothering to check in with Tim himself.

Then, two months out from the big day, Barnfield was photographed attending Norfolk Magistrates Court to support two members of the West Norfolk Foxhounds who were convicted of a particularly sickening case of illegal fox hunting. CCTV recorded the hounds chasing a fox around a householder’s patio and then ripping her to pieces. In an effort to conceal their criminality, the hunters sent a seedy terrierman onto the property to retrieve the fox’s mangled body.

Incredibly, the BHSA then announced that the West Norfolk Foxhounds would be the ‘host pack’ for the Norfolk event – you really couldn’t make it up!

Finally, on 14th September 2024 National Trail Hunting Day arrived and…er…nobody came.

Yes, the hunters grudgingly turned out to watch some charlatan drag a rag about, but none of the target audience of MPs, Police & Crime Commissioners, journalists and members of the public turned up. In fact, apart from a couple of articles in obscure regional newspapers, the whole event sank without a trace.

The HSA summed up the whole fiasco at the time:

“Given that National Trail Hunting Day was organised by a convicted fox hunter and a senior figure from the discredited Hunting Office we always knew it would be a disaster. What we couldn’t have predicted was how roundly it would be ignored by the very people it was designed to attract – the public, the police, the media and politicians. National Trail Hunting Day turned out to be a complete irrelevance – a performance without an audience – and a ban on the smokescreen of trail hunting has never been closer.”

The hunters wasted time, energy and a great deal of money on National Trail Hunting Day – and achieved nothing.

Let’s hope they do it again this year.