deer hunting
Maryland and Virginia Lawmakers Consider Sunday Deer Hunting
Karen L. Myers photoA bill to allow the hunting of deer and other wildlife on private property and state waters on Sunday has been passed by the Virginia House of Delegates and sent on to the state Senate for their consideration. Proponents of the bill cite the falling numbers of hunting licenses issued in the state, and believe that Sunday hunting will help stem the loss in revenue.
Maryland lawmakers are also considering the hunting of deer on Sunday, but seemingly for a different reason—the culling of the expanding deer herds.
There is resistance in both states to the enabling legislation. Some of the resistance comes from predictable directions—anti-hunting activists, hikers, trail riders, religious leaders—yet some of the resistance comes from a surprising quarter—foxhunters.
New Book Explores Origins of Mounted Foxhunting
George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham died of a chill caught while foxhunting. His mother bred some of the earliest Thoroughbred racehorses at Helmsley Stud. Portrait by Peter Lely, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.A new book on the beginnings of mounted foxhunting in the English shires—From the Deer to the Fox: The Hunting Transition and the Landscape 1600-1850—has been published by the University of Hertfordshire Press and released on September 15, 2013. Written by Bandy de Belin, the book disputes one commonly-held theory of why English sportsmen shifted from hunting the deer to hunting the fox as the primary quarry.
Traditional theory, according to de Belin, suggests that the disappearing woodlands and increased enclosures of the open space led to the decline of the deer population, so hunts, by necessity, turned to the fox.
