AND ANOTHER THING
`Sleek and shining creatures of the chase'
PAUL JOHNSON
Recently I sat in a canvas chair in the village street of Stogursey doing a water- colour drawing of its magnificent church of St Andrew. Originally a Benedictine foun- dation, c.1100, it has an odd, intriguing shape for an English parish church, and the play of light and shade on its white walls is tempting to the artist. I have painted it twice before, but on this occasion there was a silvery sky and pale sunlight which added a note of great subtlety. I was getting along splendidly and had almost finished when, suddenly, the entire foreground was filled with life. A scarlet-clad huntsman, on a noble chestnut horse, was taking a full pack of hounds out for their exercise. The sheer beauty of the dogs, in shades of grey, white and yellowy-brown, almost took my breath away. I possess just enough talent, as a draughtsman, to feel intense frustration that I do not have a good deal more: how I longed, in this instant, for the facility of a Stubbs or a Ben Marshall or a Munnings, to add this group to my drawing in the brief seconds before they passed out of sight!
My second thought was more sombre: if Labour has its way, this kind of scene will pass out of English village life for ever. All the villagers had come out to watch the hounds go through: their simple pleasure, like mine, would be denied. But I think we might lose more than that. My house is only a few miles away from Stogursey, up the slopes of the Quantock hills. A hundred yards from it is a copse, whose trees sway above a tangled mass of bushes growing out of a small, ancient stone quarry, abandoned perhaps hundreds of years ago. It is a haunt of foxes, whose comings and goings I watch from our terrace, sometimes with field- glasses, often with the naked eye, for they hunt rabbits right to the bottom of our gar- den and sometimes inside it. There are five at present, presided over by a vixen-matri- arch of lithe beauty, with a white tip to her huge tail.
Will such creatures survive the banning of hunting? I do not know. There are countless foxes in the district and many packs of hounds. The hounds kill large numbers, but it is a contest of skill, which the clever foxes survive. There was a big, old dog-fox, with a bright orange coat, who also lived in the copse. He had plainly been hunted many times, and laughed at his pur- suers. He disappeared two years ago, out of season, dying in his lair, no doubt, full of years and wickedness. The vixen, too, will
die of old age, I predict — she is too clever by half for the hounds — but I am not sure about her almost-grown cubs. One strikes me as particularly stupid. The hunt will probably get him this winter. Of course the cleverer the fox, the more kills he or she will make, of young lambs or chickens or ducks. The farmers put up with a system of control which continually improves the intelligence of the foxes because most of them hunt and are passionately devoted to the sport. But if the hunt is banned they will reach for their guns, and the gun is the great equaliser, against which intelligence is no defence. I could have shot the old orange fox many times over and, this sum- mer, wiped out the five who live in the copse, with no difficulty, and without stray- ing from the terrace.
I have never hunted, and it is many decades since I shot any kind of animal. Indeed nowadays I am reluctant to kill even an annoying housefly — such a miracle of God and nature is its complex, super-effi- cient body, when studied closely — and I give it three public warnings, as in all-in wrestling. So blood sports as such do not interest me. But, as a historian, I can accept the paradox that carefully-controlled hunt- ing, and the survival of species, go together. If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.
The same paradox applies to the red deer, the pride and beauty of the Quan- locks. They are admirable creatures, noticeably bigger than the ones I see in the Highlands. The living is easier, the winter far less severe. All the same, they have only survived because Somerset and Devon are the one part of England where stag-hunting
has always taken place. Like fox-hunting, it has the same effect of uniting the farming community behind a single system of con- trol, one of whose purposes is to improve the herd. A recent survey has shown that our Quantock deer are in a fine state of health, and that their numbers are growing: there are now, it is calculated, about 800 on our little range of hills. I see them constant- ly, especially in the autumn and winter. There is no more dramatic sight than a long line of red deer silhouetted against the horizon on a bleak December morning. If hunting goes, some foxes will remain, but I fear we will lose our deer. They are mon- strously destructive. Deer-fences are not particularly effective and cost a lot of money: many farmers are close to bankruptcy as it is. So they will shoot the deer as pests. Moreover, once the hunts are disbanded, and the watchful eyes of this system of communal control removed, the poachers from the cities will move in: they are already. active.
No issue separates town and country more sharply than hunting. Recently a pop singer, who has made himself a multi-mil- lionaire by filling the air with what is, to me and many others, hideous sounds, bought a tract of land in our part of the world, pay- , ing a high price for it, in order to impede stag-hunting. His wife is said to keep deer as pets. But in Devon and Somerset, the red deer are not pets: they are wild ani- mals, living the life of freedom and danger for which nature designed them, as they have done for countless thousands of years. For many centuries now, their survival has been intimately linked with the lives of the farmer-huntsmen who share with them our superb hills, moors and woods. Into this network of history and custom, as delicate as gossamer in some ways, the urban ideo- logues thrust themselves, with their igno- rance, arrogance and money. Yes: and their impudent tone of moral superiority. About the last person on earth I would listen to on moral issues is a pop singer, to me the sym- bol of metropolitan barbarism. Indeed, if there were a pack for hunting them, I might be inclined to subscribe. As it is, I doubt it such individuals, however rich, can destroy the local hunt: it is too deeply rooted in the community. But an urban-based Labour government, with all the power of a parlia- mentary statute behind it, is a different matter. Another reason for giving Neil Kin- flock the thumbs-down.
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