The troubles of the hunt do not end with their
economics. -There is also social trouble. The war between the shoot and the hunt is much more open than it used to be, much more generally acknowledged. One of the very greatest of English landowners orders and organizes annual fox-shoots on a great scale ; and as many as two score odd have been killed at one shoot. The fox is no longer sacrosanct. It is shot almost as freely in some hunting shires as, .say, on the sea coast of the West, where popular residents will show you with pride rugs made out of foxes' skins. Poultry. keepers and game-preservers both shoot foxes and talk freely of their successes. I have seen the coat of a fox nailed to the door of a poultry farm, with an account of the death subscript in white chalk, for all to read. That sort of adver- tisement of this whitewashed crime of vulpicide grows common enough to be unremarkable. In some places it is given. the flavour almost of local patriotism by the gross manners of a few of the urban supporters of the hunt, who come from afar and are not above insulting the keeper. "Where are your foxes, keeper ? Underground, I suppose ? " is not a question that inclines a keeper to preserve foxes.
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