Making the Case for Repeal this Boxing Day - plus new film
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Boxing Day is almost upon us and I hope everyone will be attending a meet, wherever they are. A listing of meets has been published by the Hunting Office whilst our team is busy briefing the media on "where we are at the end of 2011" and organising places for Boxing Day filming, with the help and support of hunts. Hunts are keen to use this platform not only to show the country how unified and determined they are to ensure their long term future, but also to ridicule the Hunting Act at every opportunity.
We bring you two documents so you too can make the case for scrapping the Act – whether to your friends, colleagues or helping to defend hunting by calling radio talk-shows and writing to newspapers. In time for Christmas we have updated our popular Case for Repeal to enable hunts and hunt supporters to articulate the Hunting Act's many failures. The updated Case for Repeal is on our website now and can be downloaded here. The document is broadly the same as the original 2007 version - we have long known that the Act is illiberal, cruel, divisive and confusing (the chapter headings).
However, we have updated it with key quotes which lend further weight to the argument against the Act, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair's admission (made in his 2010 autobiography) that: "The fox hunting subject resulted in one of the domestic legislative measures I most regret". Another heavy hitter which makes the cut is last year's report by the Better Government Initiative, a cadre of senior heavy hitters, who pronounced that: "Over the last 20 years, the public and the media have come to regard several events as notorious examples of bad government: the Community Charge (now remembered as the Poll Tax) in 1990, the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, the failure of the Child Support Agency, the Hunting Act 2004, the story of the Millennium Dome.”
Another recently-updated document which is required reading for the hunting supporter, is the report from the Veterinary Association of Wildlife Management (VAWM), entitled "Hunting, Wildlife Management and the Moral Issue." The report makes a powerful for case for hunting as a natural method of wildlife management and argues that "there are not, and never were, any scientific grounds for banning hunting with hounds on the grounds of cruelty." VAWM also observes: "To state that hunting is not morally acceptable in a civilized society is to totally misunderstand wildlife. Wild animals do not live in a civilized society" Download the document here.
I hope you will utilise the Case for Repeal and VAWM's report in your support of hunting. Never shy away from standing up for hunting and berating the disgraceful reasons the discredited and shattered Hunting Act ever made the Statute Book.
I wish you a very sporting Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Michael Thompson, Master of the Blencathra Foxhounds, and Huntsman Barry Todhunter, talk about hunting under the Act and the impact it is having. And a CA representative urges you to support your hunt this Boxing Day:
