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Seven Years Later: Has Britain’s Hunting Act Failed?
That’s the view of Barney White-Spunner, Executive Chairman of the Countryside Alliance. “Hunting remains in good heart…and support is strong,” he wrote in the Alliance’s latest newsletter. After seven years under the law, White-Spunner claims that eighty-six percent of all hunts in England have the same number or more members and most feel higher or at least the same local support as before. The Act failed spectacularly, he said, because it was more of an attack on rural people than an attempt to improve animal welfare. Although members of the Crawley and Horsham Foxhounds were found guilty recently under the Act and were fined, statistics since the Act’s passage show few convictions and much police time wasted. “A damning indictment of the expensive and failed Hunting Act,” said Alice Barnard, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance. The Act’s history has reinvigorated calls from pro-hunters to scrap the “pointless” legislation. Read a more detailed review in Kimberley Middleton’s article in The Argus. Posted November 19, 2012
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Hunting and Fishing in ID, KY, NE, and WY Now Protected by Constitutional Amendment
Voters in Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Wyoming overwhelmingly passed amendments to their state constitutions on election day protecting their rights to hunt and fish. The National Rifle Association has been pushing this amendment state by state as a preemptive strike against attacks on hunting by animal rights activism. Thirteen states had already passed such constitutional amendments: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Vermont gave their citizens the constitutional right in 1777! The rest have been passed only since 1996. Arizona was the first state to reject the initiative. Since that time Hawaii, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Pennsylvania considered legislation to amend, but failed to do so. In Kentucky, the Humane Society of the United States said that the amendment was unnecessary because there is no threat to hunting there. There was no organized opposition to the amendment, and it was labeled inconsequential by HSUS. Hunters, fishermen, and the NRA, however, are certain that hunting and fishing will be attacked in all the states at some point and wish to exercise foresight. Posted November 7, 2012
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Wise Dan Emerges Favorite for Horse of the Year
Wise Dan has emerged as a favorite contender for Horse of the Year honors after setting a new record for the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Santa Anita last Saturday. The gelding beat a strong field, including the 2011 Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom whom he bested by one-and-a-half lengths. Trained by Charlie Lopresti, Wise Dan has thirteen career wins in nineteen starts over turf, dirt, and synthetic surfaces. In Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup he bested the old mark of 1:31:89 set by Atticus in 1997 by 0.11 seconds. Read the Associated Press article on SI.com for more details. Posted November 5, 2012
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Two Families with Five Generations in the Genesee Valley Field
The Genesee Valley Hunt (NY) can boast of two families still hunting in the fifth generation. It’s no surprise that the Wadsworth family is one. After all, it was Major W. Austin Wadsworth who established the hunt in 1876. Three generations of the Wadsworth family are hunting today—Martha Wadsworth, MFH, Marion Thorne, MFH, and Piper Wadsworth—sister, step-daughter, and granddaughter of current MFH, Austin Wadsworth. The Chanler family of Geneseo is the second to attain this venerable state with the introduction of nine-year-old Mary Chanler to the hunting field this season. According to Sally Fox’s article in the Livingston Daily News, Mary is the daughter of Andrew and Alison Chanler. Mary’s family has been hunting with Genesee Valley back to great-great-grandfather Winthrop Chanler, MFH in the 1920s. I’ve been asking to hunt for years, said Mary! Posted November 2, 2012
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Fox Pen Debate Continues in Virginia
The Virginia General Assembly brought opponents and proponents of fox penning together last February in an attempt to review the practice and work out a mutually acceptable set of rules. David Whitehurst of the Department of Game and Fisheries says that no compromise acceptable to each constituency was reached. The issue is expected to be revived in the 2013 assembly session, and game officials plan to meet at 9:00 a.m. Thursday, October 18 at the state game office, 4000 West Broad Street, Richmond. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Laura Donahue, Virginia director of HSUS, accuses the game department of dragging their feet on the issue and plans to ask for a moratorium on new fox pens. In the same article, Madeline Abbitt, a lobbyist representing the Virginia Foxhound Training Preserve Association is quoted as saying, “What a fox enjoys is a good chase. That has been recorded from back in history.” In my opinion, a better argument might be to try to prove that survival of foxes in the fox pen exceeds the survival rate of foxes in the wild. Click for Rex Springston’s complete article. Posted October 17, 2012
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Hunt Club, MFH Sued: Hound Attack Alleged
A lawsuit has been filed in Buck’s County against the Huntingdon Valley Hunt and Richard Harris, MFH by a Warwick, Pennsylvania couple. John and Judy Cox claim they were attacked on January 1 while walking their blind dog in Dark Hollow Park. Hounds were hunting in the park at the time and came in contact with the plaintiffs. The woman was knocked down and claims that hounds bit her and her dog. The lawsuit charges the hunt with “reckless indifference to the rights of the Plaintiffs and others.” Harris was cited for “failure to control the dogs.” In the wake of the incident, the township briefly curtailed foxhunting in the park, but has since allowed hunting to continue there. Click to read more details in PhillyBurbs.com. Posted October 15, 2012
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Journalist Sarah Greenhalgh’s Death Is a Confirmed Homicide
Photojournalist Sarah Greenhalgh at the Blue Ridge Hunt Point-to-Point in the 1990s / Douglas Lees photo The investigation into the death of equestrian photo/journalist Sarah Greenhalgh is now entering its fourth month. On Monday, October 8, 2012, an official from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office said that Greenhalgh was murdered by a gunshot to the neck. The police are still gathering evidence, lab results are beginning to come in, but no suspects have as yet been named. The body of forty-eight-year-old Greenhalgh was discovered on Monday morning, July 9, 2012 in her home in Upperville, Virginia after a fire there was knocked down by firefighters. Followers of horse sport in the Virginia/Maryland area are familiar with Sarah Greenhalgh’s byline and photography. She has covered steeplechasing and other equestrian activities with skill and professionalism for many publications including The Chronicle of the Horse and Fauquier County newspapers. It was an off-duty fireman driving home that morning who first noticed smoke coming from the house and called 911. Investigators have expressed interest in her last Facebook posting, around 11:00 p.m. Sunday night, which indicated that she was sleeping with the windows open and hoped to be left alone. An ABC TV video segment showed a portion of that posting which included a sentence fragment that most certainly caught the attention of investigators. Unidentified witnesses told police that Greenhalgh was seen arguing with a man near his home on Sunday evening. Investigators obtained a warrant and removed articles from the man’s home. Court records show that the man had pled guilty to a road rage incident in 2011 in which he had beaten a motorcyclist. No charges have been made in this case. FHL will continue to update its reports on this tragic story as information becomes available. Posted July 11, 2012Updated July 16, 2012Updated October 10, 2012
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California Bans Hunting Bear, Bobcat with Hounds
California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill banning the hunting of bear and bobcat with hounds in that state. The bill was opposed throughout the legislative process by pro-hunting groups. Its enactment on Wednesday, September 26, 2012 represents a big success for the Humane Society of the United States, the animal rights organization that championed the legislation. The subtitle to Axie Navas’s article in the Tahoe Daily Tribune proclaims that some hail the new law as a step forward in promotion of humane hunting (italics mine). I suppose that those who hailed Hitler’s 1938 Munich Agreement with England as “Peace for Our Time” might agree with that assessment. The article reports that the number of black bears in California has nearly tripled in less that thirty years. Two years ago the black bear population was estimated at 25,000 to 30,000. Hunters help control the population by taking about 1,500 bears in a typical season. Hound hunting has accounted for nearly half of those taken. The law is scheduled to go into effect January 1, 2013. Posted October 6, 2012
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Deep Run Hunt Marks 125th Anniversary
Members of the Deep Run Hunt (est. 1887) near Richmond, Virginia, marked their 125th anniversary on Sunday, September 30, 2012 with a day of celebration, awards, and the introduction of a new book by Aynsley Miller Fisher recounting the hunt’s history. For the Love of the Sport—The Horses, Hounds, Foxes and Friends of the Deep Run Hunt Club traces the club’s moves since its founding and illustrates the pressure that land development has put on foxhunting, according to Karin Kapsidelis in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Deep Run’s anniversary celebration was bolstered by the presence of a number of visiting international sportsmen—members of a world-wide alliance working for the future of foxhunting. Posted October 5, 2012
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British Hunting Ban an Accident?
Former British Home Secretary Jack Straw says that the passage of the foxhunting ban in England was the result of a misstatement by then Prime Minister Tony Blair. In Straw’s just-published memoir, he claims Blair was “put on the spot” by a question on live TV and “accidentally” announced he would support a hunting ban. Straw claims that Blair apologized to him the following day for the slip-up. Straw believed at the time that the hunting ban was a “nonsense issue” that could have been ignored. Blair, he claims, felt similarly. However, once Blair “mis-spoke” it just wouldn’t go away. The contoversial issue prompted mass protests, marches, and even an invasion of Parliament by protesters. Blair, in his own memoir published in 2010, said that the hunting ban was “one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret.” Claiming not to know enough about the debate, he nevertheless said that he (1) engineered sufficient loopholes in the Act so that hunting could continue and (2) instructed his Home Office minister to steer the police away from enforcing the law. Some pro-hunting supporters are skeptical of Blair’s claim. They wonder why, if he was truly opposed to the Act, did he take the extraordinary step of employing the rarely-used Parliamentary Act to force the ban into law. For more details from Straw’s memoir regarding the ban, see Hannah Furness’s article in The Telegraph. Posted September 25, 2012
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