The BHSA: The Emperor’s New Clothes

Remember the Hans Christian Andersen folk tale where a couple of swindlers pose as weavers to supply lavish clothes to the Emperor that are invisible to those who are stupid or incompetent?

Now hold that thought and consider the formation of the new British Hound Sports Association, the organisation that has supposedly replaced the wholly discredited Hunting Office.

Over the last few years, hunting has been constantly on the back foot, a succession of incidents and convictions making headline news, from the infamous #smokescreen webinars right up to the recent Ollie Finnegan trial based on the seizure of his phone which contained highly incriminating evidence, corroborated by sab video footage. The Hunting Office – responsible for overseeing this absolute car crash of bad PR – had to go.

This led to the formation of the British Hounds Sports Association, a ‘new’ organisation which would apparently lead the way forward for hunting in the UK, a new force fighting for all of those involved in this minority pastime.

Except of course nothing has changed.

Just take a look at the images from both the old Hunting Office website and those on the new BHSA website. The content from both sites is identical: the same photos, the same videos, and the same ill-informed text. The only noticeable differences are removal of the word ‘hunting’, a bland new logo, and a bit of lazy reformatting.

Do the elitist fox hunters behind this rebranding expect the wider hunting community to be stupid enough not to notice and buy – yes, there’s payment involved – into this?

The simple fact is, it doesn’t matter how many new clothes they dress it up in, hunting will never change. Fox hunts are criminal gangs who terrorise our wildlife under a thin veil of legitimacy. That veil has well and truly slipped.

A HSA spokesperson commented,

“We strongly urge all hunt supporters to join the British Hound Sports Association. The Hunting Office did an outstanding job of destroying hunting, so it’s great to hear that the BHSA is a new organisation in name only. We very much hope that hunt supporters will continue to throw good money after bad by joining this inept organisation, which is peddling the same nonsense, written by the same people, from the same premises, as the disgraced Hunting Office. It is great to see that the much-vaunted re-launch of hunting is in such poor hands, and we look forward to many more self-inflicted PR disasters to come from the Hunting Office BHSA.”