sakura
Well-Known Member
Yes I am very aware of what else sabs have in their sights, as well as the concerns many people have about minority interest activists. Have you read the Hunting Act's legislator's views on the Act; what is your response to Daniel Greenbergs concerns about that? If you are not familiar with what he has said about it you can read it in it's entirety here:-
https://www.danielgreenberg.co.uk/legal-lectures/.
Particularly pertinent bits of his lecture include his statements (as the person who was required to draft this legislation amongst other really significant laws).
I was the drafter not only of the Hunting Act 2004 but of all the Government Bills that preceded it over a period of some years, and I well remember being struck by the fact that of all the legislation in which I had been involved since joining the Parliamentary Counsel Office, including Bills on matters medical, constitutional, social, fiscal and criminal, the first project in relation to which I felt seriously troubled from a moral perspective was over such an outwardly trivial matter in some respects as hunting. Let me be clear: the prohibition of hunting did not trouble me from a personal moral perspective: I do not hunt myself, and I would even go so far as to doubt whether I would personally be ethically justified in doing so, as I do not belong to a community in which it forms either a necessary part of pest control or a cherished cultural tradition. What troubled me was the fact that for the first time in my immediate professional experience the mechanism of the law was being deployed not to further some public policy objective – whether well-founded or not – but to inflict on the whole country the personal moral perspective of the 600 or so citizens who happened to find themselves in the House of Commons at the time....
From its earliest antecedents it was always clear that the Hunting Bill was not a measure aimed at advancing the public policy of animal welfare; at its best it was about morality (and of course to some it was not even that, but simply a piece of thinly disguised class warfare). The clearest proof that this was never a measure aimed at improving animal welfare is that nothing in the construction of the legislation tends towards its effective enforceability as a matter of animal welfare. Apart from the fact that the list of exemptions was deliberately, and on express instructions, framed in a way that would make circumvention obvious and easy, if one were devising an effective mechanism for advancing the welfare of the fox (and none of us will ever forget how the Burns Commission so convincingly justified the public money spent on it by its unutterably brilliant conclusion that on balance, and taking one thing with another, hunting seriously compromises the welfare of the fox being hunted) – if, as I say, one were devising a measure for safeguarding the welfare of the fox one would do it not through a few blunt criminal offences which are easy to circumvent and virtually impossible to prove (even if the Association of Chief Constables hadn’t written to the Government in advance to warn them that they had better things to do on a weekend morning than to hang around in bushes to see if people were following a fox or a drag).
If this had really been an animal welfare measure we would most likely have opted for a regulatory approach, possibly based around a licensing system: doubtless Of-fox would have been very popular, and the Chief Commissioner for Feral Foxes – or Foxcom – would have been a much sought-after sinecure. Joking aside, I suspect that most if not all organised hunts would actively have welcomed a properly founded licensing system as a way of showing their respect for the law, and for the welfare of all the animals and humans involved in the hunting tradition, which irrespective of whether the observer herself or himself chooses to hunt is clearly recognisable as being as respectable as any other community or cultural tradition, and a good deal more respectable than many.
Instead of an effective measure, therefore, the Act and the Bills for it were largely an exercise in what it has now become fashionable to describe as “virtue signalling” by persons who happened to draw their line in the sand of morality in one place in connection with animals, and many of whom would doubtless be incensed if a fortuitous majority of vegetarians in the House of Commons on another occasion sought to outlaw all those whose personal line in the sand stopped short of refraining from eating meat.
An exercise in intolerance, at a time when diversity and cultural sensitivity are meant to be more socially cherished and legally protected than at any other time in the history of the United Kingdom, indeed possibly in the history of the world. But diversity is a difficult ideal, that requires to be nurtured with great care.
I note in passing that it is interesting that it was on this moral or ethical issue of hunting that the House of Commons chose to dispense with the House of Lords and pass the Hunting Act 2004 under the Parliament Act 1911...
So how does this age of unparalleled wealth of equality law come to be known also as a social media age in which bullying, harassment and other forms and expressions of intolerance have flourished as never before? Of course, the availability and anonymity of technology has something to do with this, but I think there is a more fundamental and troubling connection...
As a lawyer, I have often been struck with how little politicians and policymakers recognise the fact that a new law dealing with a particular matter is a sign of failure and not a sign of success. Take the case of racial discrimination, one of the earliest forms of discrimination to be made unlawful, back in the 1960s. Nobody would argue that as a society we have succeeded in conquering or even taming racial discrimination; it is as powerful a poison today as it was in 1965 if not more so, despite the law having had more than half a century to counter it. And that of course is the whole point: law does not and cannot change attitudes, and if anything it entrenches unpleasant attitudes by setting their parameters in the stone of law which by aiming to coerce both creates the temptation, and sets the curriculum, for circumvention and avoidance. Attitudes and ethics can be changed by discussion and by informative education; but they cannot in general be changed by law; and having recourse to legal enforcement by way of declaring certain attitudes unlawful is in general no more than a recognition of failure to change those attitudes by other and more effective methods...
The law of hunting is in my opinion a significant example of an issue where an ephemeral majority in the House of Commons sought to enforce and perpetuate its own opinion on a moral issue without caring whether or not the balance struck by the legislation corresponded to the consensual morality of the country as a whole. It was an attempt by one side of a moral argument to coerce the other into submission. On that basis it was unlikely to be a success on any level, and it has not proved so. Sadly, it leaves unresolved some genuinely important practical issues of animal welfare, and it has widened the gulf between opposing views rather than creating a mechanism for them to explore and refine common ground.
On this forum, anti hunters have never once made a response to me asking about Daniel Greenberg's views. I would very much like to know how posters respond to this lecture - how they feel they stand in relation to his authority as a legislator and legal expert and why they think someone in his position would make such clear statements about this one piece of legislation.
I stopped reading when the writer started whinging about classism. I’m anti hunt cos I don’t want to see foxes chased and killed for sport, as is the majority of the population.
I’m getting bored of debating this now. Have fun, but remember, hunting is a dying pastime
