© 2024 Hunt Saboteurs Association
With the Labour Government committed to banning ‘trail hunting’, the HSA takes a detailed look at this activity and how it has been used for almost twenty years to circumvent the law.
‘Trail hunting’ is a wholly bogus concept that was carefully devised to allow the continuation of illegal fox hunting under the Hunting Act 2004.
It purports to involve a huntsman using a pack of hounds to search for and then follow ‘quarry-based scent trails’ that have supposedly been laid across the countryside in advance. In fact, no such trails are laid for this purpose and fox and hare hunts proceed much as they did before the passing of the Hunting Act 2004.
A watershed moment came in November 2020, when the HSA published leaked Hunting Office training webinars that proved that ‘trail hunting’ is simply a ‘smokescreen’ for illegal hunting. Since then, hunters have taken to performatively laying trails, usually in front of hunt sabs, police, or other outside observers. These actions – a facile attempt to produce a tangible ‘smokescreen’ for their illegal hunting activities – are the only occasions on which trails are actually laid.
To understand how ‘trail hunting’ claims to work, we must turn to the groups that invented it: the Countryside Alliance and the Hunting Office (now known as the British Hound Sports Association).
As might be expected of a bogus activity, the practicalities of ‘trail hunting’ are couched in very vague terms on the websites of both organisations.
Neither the Countryside Alliance nor the Hunting Office/BHSA have chosen to develop definitive rules or detailed guidance over the almost twenty years they have been promoting this activity. Instead, both provide a brief Guide to Trail Hunting that consists of just a few paragraphs.
The Countryside Alliance version claims that: “foxhound packs use an ethically sourced, quarry-based scent” to lay trails. However, “the huntsman and his whipper-in – who helps the huntsman to control the hounds – do not know exactly where the trails have been laid so the focus is on locating the laid scent using the hounds”. Thus, “the emphasis is on watching the hounds work out where the scent has been laid.”
Brief though they are, these notes are sufficient to provide huntsmen with everything they needed to evade prosecution under the Hunting Act 2004. With no trails actually laid (aside, perhaps, from some ‘smokescreen’ trails filmed by the hunt throughout the day), the huntsman has a constant, ever-present alibi accompanying him as he casts his hounds over large areas of countryside – he simply claims his ‘intent’ was to direct the hounds to search for ‘trails’.
This is the key deception at the heart of ‘trail hunting’.
Further, when the hounds find and pursue the scent line of a fox or hare, the huntsman can simply claim that he believed he was hunting a pre-laid ‘trail’.
This was initially an extremely effective tactic, with few hunts being prosecuted under the Hunting Act. Of course, this was only because of a national policing landscape that was professionally incurious about ‘trail hunting’ and all too ready to accept the word of the privileged and well-connected people involved. This fact has recently been acknowledged by Chief Superintendent Matt Longman – the National Police Council’s lead on fox hunting – who described the post-Hunting Act period as
“one of the most farcical eras in criminal justice history, because hunts are still offending. We are seeing it regularly.”
As soon as the Hunting Act became law, the Countryside Alliance produced a Hunting Handbook which purported to give advice on legal hunting under the Act. In this document, ‘trail hunting’ is presented as a temporary measure. It states that:
“Any form of trail, simulated, or mock hunting should be promoted and seen as a measure to provide activity for hounds and their followers during the ‘temporary’ ban.”
Although ‘trail hunting’ was conceptually incoherent from the outset, the Countryside Alliance hoped it would only be required for a few years before the Hunting Act was repealed. This was a serious political miscalculation, and one that has left the Countryside Alliance and the BHSA in the desperate position they are in today – trying to defend an activity that has never actually existed in material form.
For the fifteen years prior to the HSA’s November 2020 exposé of the Hunting Office’s ‘smokescreen’ webinars, the hunting world presented ‘trail hunting’ as a practice that looked identical to traditional fox hunting.
When hunts were accused of acting exactly as they had before the passing of the Hunting Act 2004, they simply replied that “trails were laid earlier.” With a national policing context that accepted such claims without question, nothing more was required for hunters to evade prosecution.
Richard Tyacke of the Hunting Office summarised this approach in an October 2018 Horse & Hound article where he claimed that “The best trail-layers are those that you don’t see from the start of the day until the finish.”
In the same article, Mark Bycroft, former huntsman of the Old Surrey, Burstow & West Kent Foxhounds, confirmed the idea that ‘trail hunting’ involves an element of competition between the huntsman and an unseen trail layer: “As the huntsman, my job was to try to outwit the person laying the trails by encouraging the hounds to work out where the trail had been laid.”
Again, in the same article, Countryside Alliance Director of Hunting, Polly Portwin, claimed that “The skill of the huntsman is to cast hounds to locate where the scent has been laid, which could be anywhere within the country available on a particular day.”
‘Trail hunting’, then, was presented during this period as an activity that is indistinguishable from traditional fox or hare hunting.
However, following the HSA’s exposé on the Hunting Office webinars, the presentation of ‘trail hunting’ radically changed, almost overnight.
Suddenly, the emphasis was on the overt laying of trails in front of any outsiders (sabs, police, the public) who were observing the hunt in an effort to suggest that ‘trail hunting’ actually took tangible form.
This is precisely the advice of former Director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, Mark Hankinson, who stated in the Hunting Office webinars that:
“A lot of people in the past have tried to say, ‘Oh, we laid trails earlier’ or ‘we laid them the day before’ – in a situation where you’ve got saboteurs out or antis or whatever that’s not really going to work too well. We need to have clear and visible trail laying going on on the day and it needs to be as plausible as possible.”
Hunts now placed an emphasis on trail layers being highly visible, often wearing tabards or driving quad bikes emblazoned with the words ‘Trail Layer.’
The absurd, ostentatious performance of laying – and perhaps filming – a trail for a couple of hundred yards bears no resemblance to the supposed practice of ‘trail hunting’ as presented since 2005 by the Countryside Alliance and the Hunting Office/BHSA. The fundamental tenet of ‘trail hunting’ – that the huntsman is involved in a battle of wits with mysterious, unseen trail layers which could last a full hunting day – was simply abandoned overnight.
To repeat, the HSA rejects the claim that any trails are laid, except those overt ‘smokescreen’ trails designed to fool outside observers.
In an admission that its reputation was irretrievably damaged by the webinars scandal, the Hunting Office was dissolved and replaced by a supposedly new governing body, the British Hound Sports Association. In fact, the BHSA is run from the same premises, by many of the same people as the Hunting Office.
Since its 2021 inception, the BHSA has placed great emphasis on a series of ‘trail laying’ exhibitions held around the country. These highly stage-managed events simply involve the laying of a trail for a couple of hundred yards in front of an invited audience of press, politicians, and police. On the 14th September 2024, the BHSA claims it will hold a National Trail Hunting Day at 30 locations across England and Wales.
Trail laying is a wholly different practice from ‘trail hunting’. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to what hunts say they do in the hunting field nor does its bear any relation to ‘trail hunting’ as described on the BHSA’s own website.
In fact, these BHSA events are part of a well-established strategy designed to fool the public about ‘trail hunting’. In 2020, Hunting Office webinar presenter Paul Jelley (now a staff member at the BHSA) specifically recommended that hunts hold a pre-season trail laying display. Jelley advised that:
“Something we used to do with the beagles when I was in charge, hold a trail laying session right at the start of the season. No other reason, do it as part of a fundraiser, a social event or something, lay a trail around a couple of fields, let your hounds go, hunt it, record it but ideally have a few independent people, not necessarily hunting folk. Invite the local policemen along, you know, local farmers who aren’t hunting folk. You can use them in evidence if you happen to go to court later on in the year.”
Incredibly, ex-police officer Jelley advised his audience of over one hundred hunt masters to use different phones when recording these events and when they are out hunting:
“So, something for you hunt staff and terriermen, trail layers and everybody to consider, if you’re recording evidence for the Hunting Act, trail laying, whatever, don’t use the same phones or anything you’ve been using for social media and bragging about what you’ve been doing out hunting.”
Of course, the press, politicians and members of the public are explicitly not welcome to attend the approximately 12,000 hunting meets that take place every year. These events are held in absolute secrecy because they consist entirely of illegal hunting activity – and any ‘outsider’ who chances on a hunt is met with suspicion and hostility.
Terriermen are an essential part of traditional fox hunting, their role being to use terriers and spades to dislodge foxes that have gone to earth so they can be killed in situ or ‘bolted’ to be hunted again.
Terriermen obviously have no place on a ‘trail hunt’ which purports to involve searching for and then following pre-laid trails. However, teams of terriermen on quad bikes have been a constant presence on ‘trail hunts’ since the passing of the Hunting Act – just as they were before it. This is yet another obvious indication that ‘trail hunting’ is a sham.
Last year the BHSA issued an edict that terriermen should not be present in the vicinity of ‘trail hunts’. This edict has been roundly ignored, with hunt saboteurs collecting evidence on a weekly basis that gangs of terriermen continue to attend almost all fox hunts.
Given that ‘trail hunts’ are in fact simply illegal fox hunts, the continued presence of terriermen – which is essential to the practice of fox hunting – is unsurprising.
Like every other aspect of ‘trail hunting’, the question of the scent used has undergone slippage over time.
For many years, the Countryside Alliance and BHSA have stated that a defining feature of ‘trail hunting’ – and one that distinguishes it from drag hunting – is that a ‘quarry-based scent’ is used.
The Countryside Alliance’s Hunting Handbook (still available on its website) is very clear on this point, stating that:
“The hounds will continue to hunt the scent of their normal quarry during the temporary ban so that they remain focused on their normal quarry.”
As recently as September 2023, BHSA Chairman Conservative hereditary peer, the 4th Viscount William Waldorf Astor III, defined trail hunting as “when hunts replicate a day’s hunting by using animal-based scents that mimic a day following a quarry species.”
However, this defining tenet has also been abandoned in recent years. Hunts now claim to lay trails using a wide variety of scents including many not derived from foxes or hares. This improbable list includes Olbas Oil, fish oil, clove oil, sandalwood, aniseed, coyote urine and human urine. This is evidence of an increasing tendency to deliberately conflate ‘trail hunting’ and drag hunting.
With ‘trail hunting’ finally under the scrutiny it deserves, many hunts have taken to carrying trail-laying equipment, such as a drag and a bottle of scent, with them on hunting days. These are simply props to be used in the performative laying of ‘smokescreen’ trails when hunts are being observed.
Drag hunting is an activity that involves a small pack of foxhounds following a strong, artificial, non-animal scent. The scent line is laid in open country approximately 20 minutes before the hounds are ‘laid on’ and the huntsman is fully aware of where the line has been laid (often over a series of jumps). A drag hunt, then, is fundamentally a test of horsemanship rather than the scenting ability of the hounds.
‘Clean Boot’ hunting is a related but different activity, where a pack of bloodhounds is used to pursue a human runner. The name is a reference to the fact that no artificial scent is used – the hounds hunt the unadulterated scent of the runner and the vegetation they disturb. Both drag and bloodhound packs openly advertise their activities and are administered by their own organisation – the Masters of Draghounds and Bloodhounds Association.
The HSA takes no interest in the activities of either drag or bloodhound packs but will continue to point out the differences between these activities and ‘trail hunting’, which is a smokescreen for illegal fox and hare hunting.
‘Trail hunting’ is a ruse that was concocted to conceal traditional hunting activity under the Hunting Act 2004. It has never been a material practice with actual rules and procedures; rather, it is a concept that has constantly shape-shifted to allow hunters to stay one step ahead of the law as they continue to hunt and kill our wildlife.
After almost twenty years of this deception, it is time for the Labour government to fulfil its manifesto commitment and ban ‘trail hunting’.
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