DingDongScabiousOnHi
Well-Known Member
"The Hunt and the Hunted"
by Ted Hughes for the Guardian, 5th July 1997
In the present debate about hunting with hounds, one big question is in danger of getting lost. If hunting is to be banned, what then happens to the deer and foxes? The accompanying graph suggests and answer. It shows how the ups and downs of the West Country deer population have matched the ups and downs of the staghunt, for the last 350 years.
The political aspects of this process are no small part of it. Since they took shape with William the Conqueror, and stepped into the open during the Civil War, it is not hard to see how they have come to bedevil the modern issue. They may well be the real issue. But simpler mechanisms are enough to be going on with.
In early times, the red deer were preserved, nominally for the King, by inheritors of the Baronial rights, who organised their own Hunt under royal licence. In those days, the threat to the deer came from the other side - from the indigenous farmers and enterprising young countrymen, those inheritors of English Saxon attitudes towards what had imposed itself, brutally, as a foreign army of occupation. Such men saw the deer as chattels of the enemy. Through successive reigns, these opposing positions became entrenched, in the traditions of country life. Hence the legends. But up to the Civil War the arrangement worked well, from the deer's point of view. Then the Civil War broke it up, and the Hunt's protection evaporated. The West Country red deer population immediately collapsed. By 1660 it was almost extinct.
One doesn't have to suppose that social vengeance prompted the massacre. Human nature was quite enough - as with animal populations everywhere. What endangers profit will be exterminated. What can be cashed in on some market will be feverishly cashed in - i.e. exterminated. This tendency may be out of control in our modern world, but it was always there. The rate thing, the unnatural and usually impossible thing, is to hit on a system of control that works.
After the Civil War, and before the Exmoor herd had disappeared completely, a North Devon family, who inherited some of the Baronial outlook if not all the rights, formed the North Devon Staghounds and re-introduced organised hunting. With the help of deer imported from Germany the herd quickly recovered. When the population reached something around 250 it levelled off and for the next 125 years never fell much below 200. This now seems like quite a small number of deer for such a large area of wild country. But the Hunt's system of control obviously had its problems. What had nearly annihilated the herd after the Civil War was still in the offing, keeping up the pressure, and waiting for its moment - which came.
When the North Devon Staghounds fizzled out in 1825, their small powers of protection went, and the deer population collapsed, just as surely as before. By 1850, it had fallen to about 50 - most of them said to be maimed and peppered with gunshot wounds. No doubt partly in response to this crisis, The Devon & Somerset Staghounds then came into being. Farmers had participated in the Hunt before. But either by policy or natural development or both, farmers now made up the main body of the new Hunt. In this period, staghunting became the sport and concern of the ordinary farmer. As a result, farmers and with them the country people in general began to change their minds about the deer. And it was here that the mysterious thing occurred - something that could never have been contrived by legislation or in any way enforced. Everybody began to protect the deer. The exceptions were too few to make a difference. The staghunt had been appropriated somehow by the whole West Country farming way of life. As a result all North Devon and Somerset became virtually a free-range deer-park. And the deer did more than recover. By the end of the 19th Century, when a second Hunt, the Tiverton Staghounds, was formed on the model of the first, the herd numbered close on 1500. In 1905, 300 could be exported to Germany - as a surplus.
Then came the First World War, and the deer population dipped again, this time under a deliberate policy of the two Hunts, to protect crops and supply food. In 1917, a third Hunt, the Quantocks Staghounds, joined in the war effort. During the Second World War, the emergency was even more acute, and the herd continued to shrink. But after the War, when things eased off, with three Hunts fully operational, the deer population soared away again, as it has continued to do ever since, right up to the 1995 census of 2,500 animals - far more than ever before in recorded history.
This must be one of English conservation's most impressive success stories. And yet it depends on a single fragile psychological factor - what I have called that 'mysterious thing'. The Hunt itself is helpless to protect the deer. The secret lies in that strange agreement among farmers and country people of the entire sprawling region, a decision arrived at God knows how, to refrain from killing the deer. The effects of this unspoken contract are so real that farmers far from the Hunt's heartland now find themselves going to some trouble to protect odd groups of resident red deer. I know one farmer 30 miles from the Hunt's usual limits who was recently tolerating over 20, on less than 300 acres. Few such farmers would suppose they were preserving the deer for the Hunt. Many of them will have little direct interest in it. But staghunting touches deep tribal springs. This attitude to the red deer has a pride and sovereignty all its own. And this is one way in which these men can confirm their solidarity with the inner life of the region: they refrain from killing the deer.
Even so, the agreement is precarious. This protection is granted to the herd on a condition. The moment the Hunt is banned, everything changes. The deer instantly lose all symbolic meaning, as the totems of a special way of life. Ejected from their sacred niche in the community, they suddenly belong to everybody and nobody. They have become vagrants, deprived of all status. Or rather, they have a new status - one that is dangerous to them. they now belong to a government that has just proved itself unsympathetic, even hostile, towards the West Country farmer's way of life. And this government, with its well-known, official faces, having taken the deer from the farmers, has straight away dumped them back on his fields as expensive squatters, to be fed and cared for by him. Meanwhile, those enterprising young locals look at the deer with new eyes. What they now see are huge, unclaimed packages of saleable meat and exciting fun just wandering about.
If the ban comes, the survival of the red deer will depend on what these farmers and locals take it into their heads to do. What will they do? will they revert to basic human form and do what they did after 1642 and again after 1825, on those earlier occasions when the Hunt withdrew its claim from the herd? It seems at least quite likely that they will. Not all at once. Gradually they will get there. And the Law that cannot protect citizens in daytime city streets will not be able to do much for those big, naive animals, so readily convertible to cash, in sparsley-populated North Devon and SSomerset criss-crossed by so many convenient access and escape routes. If the Law cannot afford to help the deer, who can? The shortage of legal weapons will stimulate ingenuity. The regular poaching gangg will feel that bit more competitive. Perhaps.
For most people the latest piece of science about the sufferings of the hunted red deer has already settled the question of whether or not to ban staghunting. But that tender concern for what red deer can suffer should go no further. Do we really want the Exmoor herd? Or can we live happily without it, as we never give a thought to the bears, the wolves and the beavers? The debate has concentrated on the effects the ban will have on country people - the act so symbolic, the shock seismic, with all manner of unpredictable consequences for our fissile society. But we should keep in mind what will happen to the red deer themselves when people wake up from the spell of the Hunt.
This uncertain future is not confined to the deer. Foxes should be pricking their ears. If Exmoor's deer are too readily convertible to cash, foxes interfere with income. For the moment, they enjoy the same indulgence as the red deer: the spell of the Hunt. But what happened in North Devon in Jack Russell's time can be reversed.
Jack Russell, who popularised the terrier that bears his name, was a fanatic foxhunter, through the mid-nineteenth Century. He would hunt six days a week. When he tried to start up a Hunt at iddesleigh, in mid North Devon, he found the country around all but empty of foxes. Whenever a fox was spotted, it was marked down, then with a great ringing of church bells the whole parish would turn out to find and kill it. In a land of sheep, chickens, ducks and geese, that was considered the right and propert fate of all foxes. At first, Jack Russell had to compete with the mob for these rare beasts. But he was an unusual man, and the extraordinary force of his character eventually began to persuade local farmers that his method was better. One or two of them then constructed artificial dens, foxes were imported, and he got a small Hunt going. That did the trick.
At this point, exactly as with the Exmoor Staghunt the mysterious thing happened. The spell of the Hunt took hold, and the country folk began to protect foxes. One record tells how: "Before two years were over, so far from persecuting the fox many a moor farmer would rather have lot the best sheep in his flock than see the gallant animal killed in any fashion except by hounds". Against heavy odds, this attitude has persisted. One result is that many foxes have been killed by hounds. But another result (more important, I imagine, from the fox's point of view) is that foxes now swarm in almost incredible abundance where formerly there were none - or only those odd visitors instantly killed. Not long ago the first meet of the local Hunt was held at Jack Russell's village, Iddesleigh. They began by drawing a small wood close to the village. A friend of mine who watched it told me: "The whole wood exploded with foxes. Twenty foxes! Hounds were running everywhere".
The sheep farmers shoot and snare foxes occasionally, but in general that easy tolerance prevails, intact enough for the foxes to flourish - like the red deer - perhaps as never before. And yet for foxes, too, the contract is flimsy. Any good excuse to kill them finds men ready. For a while in the Seventies, when a fox-pelt could fetch £25, I knew of fox-trappers who were setting lines of 300 snares. So here again, if the spell of the Hunt were to be lifted, it seems likely that country people would revert to their common sense, and their market economy, where the only virtue of a fox is to be dead.
Before we ban these hunts, perhaps we should make sure we have a new method of control (of the people) and preservation (of the animals) half as effective and simple as this strange system that our history has produced for us. That is, if we really do want the animals.
by Ted Hughes for the Guardian, 5th July 1997
In the present debate about hunting with hounds, one big question is in danger of getting lost. If hunting is to be banned, what then happens to the deer and foxes? The accompanying graph suggests and answer. It shows how the ups and downs of the West Country deer population have matched the ups and downs of the staghunt, for the last 350 years.
The political aspects of this process are no small part of it. Since they took shape with William the Conqueror, and stepped into the open during the Civil War, it is not hard to see how they have come to bedevil the modern issue. They may well be the real issue. But simpler mechanisms are enough to be going on with.
In early times, the red deer were preserved, nominally for the King, by inheritors of the Baronial rights, who organised their own Hunt under royal licence. In those days, the threat to the deer came from the other side - from the indigenous farmers and enterprising young countrymen, those inheritors of English Saxon attitudes towards what had imposed itself, brutally, as a foreign army of occupation. Such men saw the deer as chattels of the enemy. Through successive reigns, these opposing positions became entrenched, in the traditions of country life. Hence the legends. But up to the Civil War the arrangement worked well, from the deer's point of view. Then the Civil War broke it up, and the Hunt's protection evaporated. The West Country red deer population immediately collapsed. By 1660 it was almost extinct.
One doesn't have to suppose that social vengeance prompted the massacre. Human nature was quite enough - as with animal populations everywhere. What endangers profit will be exterminated. What can be cashed in on some market will be feverishly cashed in - i.e. exterminated. This tendency may be out of control in our modern world, but it was always there. The rate thing, the unnatural and usually impossible thing, is to hit on a system of control that works.
After the Civil War, and before the Exmoor herd had disappeared completely, a North Devon family, who inherited some of the Baronial outlook if not all the rights, formed the North Devon Staghounds and re-introduced organised hunting. With the help of deer imported from Germany the herd quickly recovered. When the population reached something around 250 it levelled off and for the next 125 years never fell much below 200. This now seems like quite a small number of deer for such a large area of wild country. But the Hunt's system of control obviously had its problems. What had nearly annihilated the herd after the Civil War was still in the offing, keeping up the pressure, and waiting for its moment - which came.
When the North Devon Staghounds fizzled out in 1825, their small powers of protection went, and the deer population collapsed, just as surely as before. By 1850, it had fallen to about 50 - most of them said to be maimed and peppered with gunshot wounds. No doubt partly in response to this crisis, The Devon & Somerset Staghounds then came into being. Farmers had participated in the Hunt before. But either by policy or natural development or both, farmers now made up the main body of the new Hunt. In this period, staghunting became the sport and concern of the ordinary farmer. As a result, farmers and with them the country people in general began to change their minds about the deer. And it was here that the mysterious thing occurred - something that could never have been contrived by legislation or in any way enforced. Everybody began to protect the deer. The exceptions were too few to make a difference. The staghunt had been appropriated somehow by the whole West Country farming way of life. As a result all North Devon and Somerset became virtually a free-range deer-park. And the deer did more than recover. By the end of the 19th Century, when a second Hunt, the Tiverton Staghounds, was formed on the model of the first, the herd numbered close on 1500. In 1905, 300 could be exported to Germany - as a surplus.
Then came the First World War, and the deer population dipped again, this time under a deliberate policy of the two Hunts, to protect crops and supply food. In 1917, a third Hunt, the Quantocks Staghounds, joined in the war effort. During the Second World War, the emergency was even more acute, and the herd continued to shrink. But after the War, when things eased off, with three Hunts fully operational, the deer population soared away again, as it has continued to do ever since, right up to the 1995 census of 2,500 animals - far more than ever before in recorded history.
This must be one of English conservation's most impressive success stories. And yet it depends on a single fragile psychological factor - what I have called that 'mysterious thing'. The Hunt itself is helpless to protect the deer. The secret lies in that strange agreement among farmers and country people of the entire sprawling region, a decision arrived at God knows how, to refrain from killing the deer. The effects of this unspoken contract are so real that farmers far from the Hunt's heartland now find themselves going to some trouble to protect odd groups of resident red deer. I know one farmer 30 miles from the Hunt's usual limits who was recently tolerating over 20, on less than 300 acres. Few such farmers would suppose they were preserving the deer for the Hunt. Many of them will have little direct interest in it. But staghunting touches deep tribal springs. This attitude to the red deer has a pride and sovereignty all its own. And this is one way in which these men can confirm their solidarity with the inner life of the region: they refrain from killing the deer.
Even so, the agreement is precarious. This protection is granted to the herd on a condition. The moment the Hunt is banned, everything changes. The deer instantly lose all symbolic meaning, as the totems of a special way of life. Ejected from their sacred niche in the community, they suddenly belong to everybody and nobody. They have become vagrants, deprived of all status. Or rather, they have a new status - one that is dangerous to them. they now belong to a government that has just proved itself unsympathetic, even hostile, towards the West Country farmer's way of life. And this government, with its well-known, official faces, having taken the deer from the farmers, has straight away dumped them back on his fields as expensive squatters, to be fed and cared for by him. Meanwhile, those enterprising young locals look at the deer with new eyes. What they now see are huge, unclaimed packages of saleable meat and exciting fun just wandering about.
If the ban comes, the survival of the red deer will depend on what these farmers and locals take it into their heads to do. What will they do? will they revert to basic human form and do what they did after 1642 and again after 1825, on those earlier occasions when the Hunt withdrew its claim from the herd? It seems at least quite likely that they will. Not all at once. Gradually they will get there. And the Law that cannot protect citizens in daytime city streets will not be able to do much for those big, naive animals, so readily convertible to cash, in sparsley-populated North Devon and SSomerset criss-crossed by so many convenient access and escape routes. If the Law cannot afford to help the deer, who can? The shortage of legal weapons will stimulate ingenuity. The regular poaching gangg will feel that bit more competitive. Perhaps.
For most people the latest piece of science about the sufferings of the hunted red deer has already settled the question of whether or not to ban staghunting. But that tender concern for what red deer can suffer should go no further. Do we really want the Exmoor herd? Or can we live happily without it, as we never give a thought to the bears, the wolves and the beavers? The debate has concentrated on the effects the ban will have on country people - the act so symbolic, the shock seismic, with all manner of unpredictable consequences for our fissile society. But we should keep in mind what will happen to the red deer themselves when people wake up from the spell of the Hunt.
This uncertain future is not confined to the deer. Foxes should be pricking their ears. If Exmoor's deer are too readily convertible to cash, foxes interfere with income. For the moment, they enjoy the same indulgence as the red deer: the spell of the Hunt. But what happened in North Devon in Jack Russell's time can be reversed.
Jack Russell, who popularised the terrier that bears his name, was a fanatic foxhunter, through the mid-nineteenth Century. He would hunt six days a week. When he tried to start up a Hunt at iddesleigh, in mid North Devon, he found the country around all but empty of foxes. Whenever a fox was spotted, it was marked down, then with a great ringing of church bells the whole parish would turn out to find and kill it. In a land of sheep, chickens, ducks and geese, that was considered the right and propert fate of all foxes. At first, Jack Russell had to compete with the mob for these rare beasts. But he was an unusual man, and the extraordinary force of his character eventually began to persuade local farmers that his method was better. One or two of them then constructed artificial dens, foxes were imported, and he got a small Hunt going. That did the trick.
At this point, exactly as with the Exmoor Staghunt the mysterious thing happened. The spell of the Hunt took hold, and the country folk began to protect foxes. One record tells how: "Before two years were over, so far from persecuting the fox many a moor farmer would rather have lot the best sheep in his flock than see the gallant animal killed in any fashion except by hounds". Against heavy odds, this attitude has persisted. One result is that many foxes have been killed by hounds. But another result (more important, I imagine, from the fox's point of view) is that foxes now swarm in almost incredible abundance where formerly there were none - or only those odd visitors instantly killed. Not long ago the first meet of the local Hunt was held at Jack Russell's village, Iddesleigh. They began by drawing a small wood close to the village. A friend of mine who watched it told me: "The whole wood exploded with foxes. Twenty foxes! Hounds were running everywhere".
The sheep farmers shoot and snare foxes occasionally, but in general that easy tolerance prevails, intact enough for the foxes to flourish - like the red deer - perhaps as never before. And yet for foxes, too, the contract is flimsy. Any good excuse to kill them finds men ready. For a while in the Seventies, when a fox-pelt could fetch £25, I knew of fox-trappers who were setting lines of 300 snares. So here again, if the spell of the Hunt were to be lifted, it seems likely that country people would revert to their common sense, and their market economy, where the only virtue of a fox is to be dead.
Before we ban these hunts, perhaps we should make sure we have a new method of control (of the people) and preservation (of the animals) half as effective and simple as this strange system that our history has produced for us. That is, if we really do want the animals.
