This is taken from the website and 
written by Douglas Batchelor, CEO of The League Against Cruel Sports charity on 15 July, 2011
One of the things that I have learnt over the years that I have been working with the League is that our issues are all about what people do to animals and sometimes to other people as well. All too often it is an animal that suffers the consequences of some person’s act. And all too often the consequence of their actions is suffering followed by death.
The question that has to be asked and should be answered is why do those people, who choose to cause animals to suffer and choose to kill them, do what they do? The people who hunt, chase and kill for sport will tell you that the animals don’t suffer much – if at all – and they will tell you that the animals were a pest, or that there were too many of them, or that they were diseased in some way. The one thing that they very rarely will say is that they hunt, shoot, chase and kill because they enjoy it.
In life every individual has choices. We can all choose to be cruel or to be kind. We can choose to be law abiding or to become a criminal. We can choose to be social or anti social. We all have choices. The question we need to ask is why do some people in our midst choose to be cruel and kill for sport?
Bloodsports are activities where people are making a conscious choice to chase and kill for sport. The question is, what is it that attracts people to indulge in these cruel and lethal acts?
The answer to the questions above is very simple. Some people actually like chasing and killing. They get pleasure from their acts of cruelty and dominance. They enjoy being with like minded people, because it normalises and validates their predilections to violence and the killing for sport.
Over the years of dealing with the hunting and shooting lobbies I have come to the conclusion that hunters and shooters are in fact people who choose to let out their beast within. They choose to chase, harry and kill because it makes them feel good. The beast that lurks within them is their propensity for violence, their pleasure in suffering and death, and the dominance over lives of sentient beings that they can achieve through their bloodsports.
The beasts within the hunters and shooters rage and their participation in bloodsports is where they give free expression to their inner lusts for dominance and the death of those they dominate. In essence the raging beast within wants power, and the power to take a life is about as powerful as it gets.
The power fix that the hunters and shooters seek takes many forms. They seek, they chase, they dig out, they shoot and they kill. Sometimes it is one target animal and on other occasions it is many. But the end sought is always dominance and death.
What is amazing in our society is the fact that we allow such beastly behaviour within the law. Given how fundamentally unhealthy such predilections for dominance and abuse are, it is amazing that the people who exhibit such profoundly disturbed psychoses are not seen as being a danger to society and to themselves and then treated accordingly. Criminalising animal abuse and dominance for sport would be a good place to start.
Sometimes the elephant in the room is so big people just don’t want to see it. Some examples of these elephants will perhaps help to make my point.
If someone was living in town and had lots of cats who in turn had lots of kittens and they fed them all and looked after them, we might think them a little eccentric but no more than that. But if they then turned their kittens out into the local park and set dogs onto them for sport, there would be uproar. If when their dogs caught the kittens they didn’t kill them and they brought them back to their master or mistress who then dispatched them by wringing their necks, there would be further uproar.
The mass rearing and release of pheasants and partridges to be used as live targets for sport is in animal welfare terms no different to the kitten hunt described above, but the pheasant shoot is legal while the kitten hunt is not.
If someone living in town bred lots of puppies from their dogs and then organised fights between the puppies, selecting as the winners only those that showed aggression and a willingness to chase and fight, while killing the friendlier puppies, there would be uproar.
But in autumn, cub hunting where a hunt takes a pack of young hounds out to the woods where there are fox earths and fox cubs and encourages the young hounds to chase and to kill the young foxes they are committing an illegal act. No action is taken against the hunt for killing the puppies that don’t make their grade or for culling the older hounds at the end of their working lives, often because they simply aren’t found out.
When a pack of hounds chase and then kill a fox by disembowelling it, whether by accident or design, the fox has clearly suffered, but the cruelty of the kill is not itself a crime, even though the chase and kill may well have been a criminal act.
The elephant in the room, is that hunters and shooters are people who organise a chase and kill for pleasure. Their activities are such that if they were carried out in town with domestic animals and not wild ones, they would be prosecuted. They would become pariahs in the streets where they lived and no-one would want to know them. But the hunters’ and shooters’ front rooms are in the countryside and the people involved are some of the highest, wealthiest and most prominent in the land.
In the countryside the elephant in the room has blood all over it. The children who are initiated into the adult hunting and shooting pack are steeped in bloodsports from an early age. They are taught that chasing and killing for sport is good not bad. They are taught that dominance over the lives of other animals is their right. They are taught that country ways are killing ways and that the rules in town do not apply in the countryside. They are taught that to disagree is to be ignorant and wrong.
For the good of society we need to recognise just how unhealthy and how dangerous these beasts in our midst actually are. These are people taught to chase and kill for pleasure. These are the people who do not accept the norms and the laws that the vast majority choose to observe and to live by as hallmarks of a good and decent society. These are the people who are still campaigning for the law to be rolled back so that the setting of dogs onto foxes, deer and hares for sport is no longer a crime. Say no way to these beasts within our society. Make all cruelty to animals, be they wild, farmed or domestic. a crime.
