[Reader-list] article on hunting

[Bijoyini]

This is an interesting article from the british author
Jeanette Winterson that seems more pertinent to the
european rural life. However, it reminds me of an
essay I read by John Berger called "Why look at
Animals". He writes that it is hard for urban
strangers to understand how a french peasant becomes
fond of his pig and is glad to 'salt the pork'. It is
hard for them to understand that animals are bred
_and_ sacrificed, subjected _and_  worshipped (note
the use of _and_ and not _but_)

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism/guardian/sept_16_countryside_debate.htm

--Bijoyini

When I moved to the Cotswolds eight years ago, I was
anti-hunt. I had never been to a Meet, talked to any
of the characters involved, or visited the kennels. I
knew nothing about horses. Yet I was wary of imposing
my views on people I had only just met, so I decided
to test my instincts against the reality of the
situation. I agreed to let the Hunt continue to ride
over my land a season. In the meantime, I learned to
ride myself, and I spent a lot of time listening and
watching.

I became friendly with a kennel man, who earns very
modestly, lives in a tied cottage, and is content. He
does not want to win the lottery or be rich and
famous; he wants to breed hounds. He explained to me
that you have to stick with the job for at least five
years, because that's how long it takes to bring on a
hound. There is no reward, other than the work itself.

The stereotype of hunting is the fat men and loud
ladies baying for blood at the weekend after a week's
stock-broking. There are some of those, but they are
not why hunting happens, or why it should be allowed
to continue. I believe it should continue, because I
have seen how closely hunting meshes with the economic
and social fabric of rural living. It is not enough to
argue that country people with real skills, who work
with dogs and horses, as breeders, farriers, trainers,
grooms, whippers-in, muckers -out, should all go and
work in tea-shops or sell postcards.
The Countryside March next weekend will not be packed
with unspeakable toffs and sinister slit-eyed badger
baiters; it will be a march of ordinary people who
feel they are being slowly bred to death by an urban
drive to make the countryside anaemic.

On the new Animal Farm, Tourism is Good. Farming is
Bad. Rambling is Good. Landowning is Bad. Foxes are
Good. Hunting is Bad.

These cheap, dreary polarities tell no truth, but they
are politically useful to New Labour, who have handled
the issues around Farming, Hunting, and the Right to
Roam, clumsily enough to turn genuine questions
needing to be asked, into walls of mutual animosity.

Labour talks about bring a One Nation Party, but that
will never happen while urban values are forced on the
Countryside in the name of Democracy.
It is true that country sports, and the employment
they generate, involve killing animals. If we were a
nation of vegetarians, our objections to hunting might
carry more weight, but I am out of sympathy with the
hypocrisy of those who seize on fox hunting as easy
prey, while ignoring the more urgent issues of animal
welfare and husbandry.

Why is it perfectly acceptable to eat meat that has
been reared in misery, brutally transported and badly
butchered, but unacceptable to ride to hounds?
Why is it fine to keep a large dog in a small city
flat, but disreputable to be a terrier man?

There is no logic to the hunting issue, and it makes
no sense to ban hunting, and licence shooting and
fishing. The next target will be eventing and racing.
In any case, all equestrian sport begins on the
hunting field; it is the only place to socialise
horses.

Drag hunting? Well, if it placates your conscience,
fine, but it won't save the life of a single fox, who
may not thank you for your kindness in shooting or
gassing him, instead of hunting him.

Meanwhile, intensive farming, which is what the public
demands because it wants cheap food, will continue.
That means declining wildlife and the abject
conditions of reared stock.

Here's a true story.

I keep hens. If you keep hen you also keep rats.
Nobody is interested in a Rat Protection Bill, so you
can kill them as you wish. The best way - and the most
dramatic - is to get in a terrier man. Boots up to the
knee are essential, unless you are truly hard, and
content to tie the bottoms of your trousers with
string.

Once the rats are on the move, the terriers are
loosed, and will dig them out. It is a fast-moving,
high adrenaline pursuit, and when the dogs really get
going, two of them will jump a rat and pull it apart
like a Christmas cracker.

The man who does this for me has a thirteen year old
boy who goes to a school in town. He told me how his
teacher had over-heard him talking about our ratting
weekend, and made an example of him before the class.
The teacher said that what James had done was brutal
and unnecessary. They are kinder ways to kill rats.

'No' said James, and tried to explain that Warfarin,
the poison of choice, takes three days to kill a rat,
who bleeds to death through the stomach. Any animal or
bird that eats the rat will be poisoned too.

To trap a rat humanely, you must bait the trap with a
sausage - so too bad for the pig - and the rat still
has to be killed somehow. I've tried this method, and
either you drown the rat in a bucket or you blow its
brains out. Either way it squeals continuously.

Is James de-sensitised by his ratting days? Does
shooting crows with his air rifle and hanging them
upside down to scare off other birds, make him a
coarser boy than he would be if he hung around
shopping malls or slobbed in front of the telly?
In the endless debate about rural and urban values,
which seems to obsess around the hunting issue, no-one
asks how it has de-sensitised and coarsened human
beings to live in cities, cut off from our
evolutionary environment,
William Wordsworth was one of the first writers to
confront the deadness of urban living in the new
industrial revolution. We think of him vaguely as a
Nature poet, but his work was not about nature, it was
about Nature's effect on the soul of Man - and what
happens to the soul when it loses Nature's daily
presence.

What certainly happens is that cut off from the
realities of Nature, we become outraged by them.
Nature, and animals, are amoral. Our own morality has
developed around a careful code of protecting
ourselves from others and others from ourselves Freud
took the view that we create civilisation to save us
from the ruthlessness of the natural world. It is good
that we should do so - it is not good when we
re-interpret the natural world as a moral failure; a
primitive state that needs constant intervention.

New Labour believes in constant intervention, but what
the countryside needs is to draw up its own agenda for
change and sustainability. If that includes hunting,
so be it.

I hope that the international crisis will not be used
as an excuse to dismiss the March as minority moaning.
The problems of this small island remain the same in
miniature as the problem presently facing the whole
world; how do we live side by side, without forcing
everyone to live in the same way?

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