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While Boxing Day—the day after Christmas—passes largely unnoticed in the U.S., it traditionally draws large number of riders and spectators at foxhunting meets in England. According to The Daily Mail, a quarter of a million hunt supporters turned out for meets all across the country. Now a bank holiday in England, Boxing Day is thought to derive its name from the boxing and giving of gifts by wealthy folks to their servants after enjoying their own holiday on Christmas Day. The servants would have the following day off to visit their own families and bring boxes of gifts and probably leftover food. Since the foxhunting ban was passed in England, Boxing Day crowds annually refocus attention on the sport, eliciting statements in the press supporting and condemning both sides of the issue. Before forming his government, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a free vote in Parliament on a repeal of the hunting ban. However, as we have reported, because the outcome of the vote is uncertain at this time, there hasn’t been great pressure to bring the matter to the floor. Posted December 30, 2011

Morven Park and its lovely grounds in Leesburg, Virginia are familiar to many foxhunters. The former estate of the late Governor Westmoreland Davis has been home for many years to the Virginia Foxhound Show, meets of the Loudoun West Hunt, and the Morven Park Steeplechases. The mansion has recently been refurbished—a major project taking several years to complete—and Morven Park’s Board of Trustees are now grappling with formulating a vision for the future of the 1200-acre estate. A number of strategies have been identified with the goal of making it more accessible and relevant to a broader public. The expanded mission is expected to require significant fund raising to implement needed improvements, and decisions are being made as to which facilities and activities will survive and which will be discontinued. One casualty of the plan, according to Margaret Morton’s article in Leesburg Today,  will be the Morven Park Steeplechase Races. The other equestrian facilities, however, will be improved for dressage, carriage driving, trail riding, eventing, show jumping, and therapeutic riding. “The annual Memorial Day weekend Virginia Foxhound Club show, the largest hound show in the world, will not be affected,” according to the article. Posted December 27, 2011

Mary Motion at sixteen is one of only four riders of that age in the country to have earned a steeplechase amateur jockey’s license. Riding against some of the best and experienced jockeys last fall on Pennsylvania Hunt Cup Day, she placed third. It was only a few years ago that Motion was tearing up the turf in the pony races at the point-to-points against the other moppets. Her latent genes were waiting to express themselves from the start, and she caught the racing bug early. Both her mother and grandmother raced, her father Andrew is a Thoroughbred breeder, and her uncle Graham, a trainer, saddled last year’s Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom. Motion is under the tutelage of a pair of the very best trainers in Neil Morris and Doug Fout, both in Virginia, and her sights are set on the Maryland Hunt Cup. Read more about this talented young foxhunter/race rider in Danielle Nadler’s article in Leesburg Today. Posted December 8, 2011

A morbid meeting place at first blush, but this historic tavern in Mount Royal, New Jersey, built around 1727, came by its name in the course of honest business—providing drink and sustenance to members of the Gloucester Fox Hunting Club after their hunts. Founded in 1766 by a group of Philadelphia gentlemen, the Gloucester Foxhunting Club was the first organized hunt in the New World. The club was named for Gloucester County in New Jersey, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. The club flourished from 1766 to 1818, and presumably so did the Death of the Fox Inn. During the Revolutionary War, according to Kelly Roncace in her article in the Gloucester County Times, the inn was used as a recruiting center and military headquarters. Some of the more grisly history of the inn is associated with the hanging of a Tory from a walnut tree nearby. Today, it is a privately owned home with six fireplaces, wide floorboards, and some of the original doors and hardware. Posted December 8, 2011

Congress recently cleared the way for the resumption of horse slaughter in the United States after a report by the General Accounting Office revealed that their earlier actions actually harmed the welfare of horses. (See prior FHL news item on this subject.) While most animal rights activists have expressed opposition to Congress’s turn-about, PETA, strangely, did not. PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk now finds herself agreeing with many horseman by stating publicly that Congress never should have ended horse slaughter to begin with. She acknowledges that the amount of suffering caused by the ban exceeded the amount of suffering it was supposed to stop. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Read more in the Christian Science Monitor. Posted December 1, 2011

What is a fox hunt? Well, it depends on whom you ask. If you are talking to a ham radio operator, he/she is apt to tell you that foxhunting is a sport over the airwaves in which ham radio enthusiasts search for a hidden transmitter—the fox—using directional antennas. In one form, an amateur radio club will hold an annual fox hunt at a mutually decided wooded location—the meet—and a group of ham operators—the hounds—try to find the fox. They look a lot like your huntsman after a meet trying to recover his missing hounds by homing in on their radio collars with his directional radio receiver. Instead of bragging about how well their horses jump the fences, these foxhunters pride themselves in the design and discrimination of their antennas and the electronic nuances of their hand-held receivers. Click here for a fox hunt with the Bullit ARS in Bernheim Forest, Shepherdsville, Kentucky. Posted November 23, 2011

This year, Congress is expected to reverse the defacto ban on horse slaughter in the U.S. Annually, since 2005, the appropriations bill for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has arrived at both houses of Congress with riders (sponsored by the HSUS) disallowing any funds that would allow USDA to inspect horses in transit to slaughter facilities. It was a backdoor move by animal rights activists (and approved by many horse lovers that cannot bear the thought of horses for human consumption) that effectively ended all horse slaughter in the U.S. In a report to Congress earlier this year, the General Accounting Office (GAO)—Congress’s objective and apolitical investigative arm—said in essence that horse welfare has been harmed by the closing of slaughter houses in the U.S. (See Foxhunting Life news report.) This year it appears that Congress will heed the GAO report. The conference committee preparing the legislation for Congress’s vote has omitted these riders to the bill, and once the bill reaches Congress, no amendments can be appended. If the bill passes as expected, USDA inspection of horses in transit could resume, and the reopening of slaughter houses in the U.S. could be economically feasible once again. At the time the last facilities were closed, there were one hundred thousand horses being disposed of annually. As the GAO found during their investigation, retirement facilities were unable to absorb even a small fraction of unwanted horses, and in 2010, 138,000 horses were exported to Mexico and Canada for slaughter. “The horses are traveling farther to meet the same end….in foreign slaughtering facilities where U.S. humane slaughtering protections do not apply,” said the GAO in their report. Posted November 16, 2011

Gillian Dupont, founder and owner of The Old Habit in Marshall, Virginia, passed away Sunday, October 30, 2011 after a courageous battle with cancer. Her sister was by her side. There will be a service at the Leeds Episcopal Church in Hume, Virginia on Thursday, November 3rd, at 11 am.  There will be a small reception after the service to share memories.  Many of us here in Virginia probably went hunting a little better turned out due to Gillian. Posted November 2, 2011