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.