The reason why
Charles Moore
The Editor wants to know why people hunt. Being a classicist, he puts it differently. He asks what is the mens rea of the hunter.
Looking round the leading members of the Vale of Tears Hunt (VT), let us search for their mens rea. Let us picture each, one by one, as they do in war films or westerns to fix the main characters in the minds of the audience.
Arthur, the joint master, is what you would get if you went to Harrods (preFayed) and said: 'I want a Master of Foxhounds, please.' He is a red-faced gentleman and wholly conservative. His father died out hunting with us, and I'm sure he would be happy to do the same. Despite his appearance, he is charmingly vague and mild, but I wouldn't dare ask him why he hunts. He'd think it a strange question. When you watch him in the field, you notice that he is not studying or planning, as some do. He is simply waiting for hounds to speak. As soon as they do, he is away, occasionally in the wrong direction. His not to reason why.
For Ted the chicken farmer, hunting is a more practical affair. He is equipped as for a great expedition with knives and pliers and rope and string and a saddlebag and an ingenious sheath for holding his flask of cherry brandy. He will work his way through the terrain, cut his way through it if necessary. Always on the qui vice, he will gallop like a despatch rider between Jack the huntsman and everyone else, endlessly helpful with gates or wire or riders who are in trouble. For Ted, hunting is a series of practical problems to be solved, a game to make the country which he knows so well yield its quarry.
He's madder than he pretends, though. When we have a run, Ted thrusts forward over the trappiest jump and worst wire, laughing as he goes. I think he likes trouble, which is just as well because he always gets it from his wife, Lily, who whips in. The sound of her telling him off at the end of the day is as evocative as that of Jack blowing for home.
I mentioned Muffin in a previous column. He's the terrier man. I couldn't ask him his MenS rea either, but I suspect him of dark thoughts. Like most people who are deep about hunting, he never thinks about horses. He will have been up at dawn stopping earths, and now he's on the quad bike with terriers in their cage and shovels and Foxy Dave who is as thin as Muffin is
stout. The colours of Muffin's world are all mud and blood. He and Dave are after the fox and nothing else. 1 sometimes think they are more like hounds, or even like the fox, than they are like the rest of us. They are part of the natural world, and therefore have no use for explanations.
All of us are watched by Artemis, the lady master. Nothing escapes her eye, but little attracts her censure. A lifetime with horses makes you either tolerant or furious, and she is the former. Because she trains pointers and her husband trains racehorses, she's differently mounted most days, often on lunatics. She rides as if there were no more natural or easy place in the world to sit. Artemis loves her hunting, but she has the woman's gift for imagining how it is for everyone else. Part-teacher, parthostess, part-mother, she wants it all to work and to give pleasure.
So the end in view is not the chase or the kill, but everything — the welfare of the Vale of Tears Hunt.
What's my mens rea? When I was nine years old, and went hunting for the first time, I used to consult my Pony Club Diary which was interspersed with improving stanzas of poetry. One, by W.H2O. (WHO. he? Readers, please tell me) went, as I partially remember:
Not for the love of killing, Nor for the sake of pride, Nor for the hate of the hunted, Do we English saddle and ride, But for [can't remember this hit ... I The blood in our veins which flows, To answer for ever and ever, The challerwe, Yonder he goes!'
Which is no more than saying we hunt because we hunt, but it still makes my eyes prick.
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