Laying A False Trail
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane”. Marcus Aurelius, 121 – 180 AD.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘laying a false trail’, it refers to the practise that
the pro-hunting fraternity have engaged in since their pastime became illegal back in 2004. Instead of relentlessly pursuing a fox with hounds that are bred for stamina, now the hunts get one of their number to lay a false trail beforehand for the pack to follow. This means that everyone concerned can still enjoy a wonderful day out, traipsing across the fields and through the woods if they’re on foot, or feeling the wind in their faces as their noble steeds hurtle across the countryside if they’re on horseback.
In the bad old days, we’re assured by the pro-hunting lobby that hardly anyone ever saw the fox, while fewer still were on hand to witness its agonising death, unless of course you were one of the terriermen whose job it was (note past tense) to set dogs onto the terrified, exhausted creature underground, to either drive it back to the surface or else rip it apart in it’s earth pit. So, just about everyone’s happy now, although it’s sadly inevitable that accidents will happen when a pack of baying curs are let loose to pursue a scent, because the unthinkable might happen and they might just possibly become distracted by the real thing while roaming fields and woods.
Or they might take it into their canine heads to tear apart any unfortunate household pet that they encounter during the course of their rampage, but we must of course keep a sense of proportion over all this, while we must also assume someone to be innocent of deliberately hunting foxes with dogs until such time as they’re proven guilty in court.
By a remarkable coincidence, as I write this, it appears that a number of such cases are being prosecuted. Inevitably, the pro-hunting lobby claim that it’s all been a terrible misunderstanding, while they further add to this sense of confusion by laying another false trail. By this, I refer to the terms and expressions they use to try to justify ripping a British mammal apart with dogs for the pleasure of human onlookers; they express themselves in this fashion in the hope that the majority of the British public will all come to share their enlightened view that the practise of training dogs to chase foxes and tear them apart as a recreation is perfectly reasonable.
Then we come to the ‘sport’ part of ‘field sports’ and ‘blood sports’. A sport is universally regarded as a contest between two equally-matched participants or teams, so to describe as a ‘sport’ a crowd of riders on horseback, supported by followers on foot and others in off-road vehicles, all following a 50 strong pack of hounds as they pursue one creature roughly the size of a whippet, seems slightly inaccurate. When you consider the additional use of walkie-talkies, mobile phones, terriers, the terriermen and the grim practise of blocking any tunnels that the fox might find sanctuary in, it all seems a bit one-sided.
Then we learn of ‘tradition’, which brings to mind bull-baiting, cock-fighting and others, all of which have rightly been consigned to the history books on account of the vile cruelty involved. In essence, the pro-hunting lobby are simply retreating into the use of euphemisms and philosophical abstractions in what’s proving to be a futile attempt to conceal the sheer horror of the activity they want legalised. In this vein, another little gem that’s regularly presented by some politicians who support hunting is the mention of “the current law on fox hunting.” When speaking or writing about “the current ban on fox hunting”, the cunning plan is to plant in the mind of an audience the notion that the ban may not be here to stay, followed swiftly by references to tradition, wildlife management, sport, vermin and anything else potentially useful that springs to mind.
And so it goes. Hunt monitors, for example, who are often women out alone simply filming the entirely legal pastime of hounds following a trail, are accused of being “animals rights fanatics” capable of shocking violence and and even more shocking verbal abuse if law-abiding trail hunt followers so much as look at them the wrong way. By contrast, the gruesome terriermen have vanished from the lexicon of hunting and they’ve been replaced instead by the far more user-friendly term ‘countrymen’. So, as things stand, it’s no longer legal to set dogs onto a British mammal for the pleasure of onlookers when it’s finally ripped apart while still alive, but there are those who are seeking to persuade us that it’s all simply a matter of benign, rosy-cheeked countrymen trying to conserve God’s creatures while being opposed by a foul-mouthed mob of virtual terrorists who all originate, incidentally, from the cities.
In other words, the blood sport enthusiasts want to be able to gloat over the mangled bodies of foxes, so to do this, they’re shamelessly mangling the English language as well. As far as I’m aware, spouting unmitigated rubbish isn’t actually against the law, which is a good thing, because watching the pro-hunt lobby desperately groping for a remotely convincing excuse for killing animals for fun continues to provide the rest of us with an amusing, benign and deeply satisfying spectator sport of our own.
By Mabarbal May 2012
