hunting culture

The battle over fox-hunting in England has led to a crisis of authority in the state itself. Anthony Barnett asks John Jackson, a key figure in the case and chairman of a leading law firm, Mishcon de Reya, to comment on the significance of the latest decision by a high-level panel of judges.

The unchallengeable heart of the case against fox-hunting is that it inflicts cruelty on its quarry, says a prominent figure in Britain’s animal protection movement.

A former leading official with Britain’s League Against Cruel Sports describes how he came to change his mind about banning hunting with dogs.

Even before the British government of Tony Blair first proposed to ban hunting with dogs in England and Wales two years ago, thus provoking massive protest demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people, openDemocracy realised that this polarising issue required discussion and dialogue between voices on different sides of the argument. The result was our debate of June–December 2002, “Hunting culture – is there a place for hunting in the modern world?”

Hunting is about animals as well as people. And people are also animals. We need to amend our attitudes and practice towards other animals to become compassionate and caring.

Hunters in Britain are challenged by legal bans and animal rights campaigns. They need an imaginative leap over mental boundaries, by reaching out to native peoples such as the Bushmen/San, now facing harsh modernity without any right to choose. Is it possible to create a new, global narrative that joins both types of hunter in a shared defence of human rights and fragile wildness?

The discussion of hunting and hunters needs to be conducted with realism and without sentimentality, says Richard D North.

Protest in defence of a minority’s rights in a democracy - whether hunters or homosexuals - is justified. But only one of these activities is under legal assault in Britain.

Richard Burge, Chief Executive of the Countryside Alliance, and Karen Bartlett, Director of Charter 88, talk with openDemocracy’s Anthony Barnett and Sophie Jeffreys.

The hunter-gatherer will practise unsustainable resource management; the hunter-landowner is a safer bet for the environment.

The recent forced removal of 2,000 Bushmen/San people from their homeland in the Kalahari area of central Botswana is not just a brutal act of ethnic cleansing; it also means the end for a hunter–gatherer society whose care and knowledge of their fragile eco-system hold many lessons for the rest of humanity. The Johannesburg summit must attend to the inhumanity on its doorstep.

All human societies, and even non-human societies, do have rank and hierarchy though they measure it differently.

A distinguished anthropologist of the Inuit agrees that in English tradition hunters and farmers use landscape in distinct and complementary ways. But against the broader canvas of human history and the experience of hunter–gatherer societies, there are vital differences: of knowledge of territory, of social relations, and in the nature of ‘respect’.

Roger Scruton's vision of hunting as egalitarian only works by eliding significant historical evidence of regional diversity and social inequality.

Landscapes are made and maintained as well as ‘natural’. The uniqueness of the English rural landscape is that it has been created and sustained by the conjoined efforts of generations of farmers and hunters. Moreover, the hunter–gatherer instinct – ‘belonging without owning’ – is at the root of Englishness.