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GREAT BRITAIN: For the Kill

3 minute read
TIME

When he lived in Australia, the Rev. Colin Craven-Sands thought highly of British fox hunting. “I had seen pictures of hunting scenes,” he remembers, “and I liked the pretty dress worn by hunting folk.” Shortly after taking up his duties in a small Cornwall parish, Mr. Craven-Sands one day saw the local Four Burrow Hunt bring a fox to ground. What he thought he saw and heard changed his mind about fox hunting.

The vicar wrote to the Daily Herald: “I hardly expected to find half a hundred gaily attired men & women enjoying a display of such revolting cruelty.” His letter said that the huntsmen had wantonly dug the fox out of its earth and tossed it “into the midst of a score of yelping hounds, who tugged at it to the accompaniment of its agonized screams.” It gave, he added, “a frightful impression of bloodlust.”

Cornwall’s huntsmen stiffened in their saddles. “I never heard a hunted fox scream in my life,” snorted Captain George Percival Williams, Master of the Four Burrow Hunt. Captain Williams stoutly denied that the fox was alive when the hounds touched it. “I was blowing my horn and everybody was making a devil of a row.” Then he sued the vicar for libel. In court, Mr. Craven-Sands apologized to Captain Williams; he said that he had been wrong in believing that the fox was alive when thrown to the hounds. Mr. Gilbert Beyfus, counsel for Captain Williams, said to the jury: “Let your verdict be a strong one. Let it be the kill. Let it be the death blow to all these lies and defamations.” The jury’s verdict against the vicar, whose yearly salary is £400: £1,500 damages, and costs.

Elsewhere in Britain last week, other blood-sportsmen stood bloodied but unbowed before their detractors. In Wiltshire, a meeting of local county executives gave short shrift to a Labor bill recently introduced in Parliament “to prohibit the hunting and coursing of certain animals.” If such a bill became law, they warned, “Labor’s Minister of Agriculture could forget all about any future cooperation from farmers.” In Yorkshire, the Master of the Bedale Hunt stood firm against the attack of a lifelong cripple who, denied the use of his arms, had seized a pen in his teeth to charge the Master of Foxhounds with throwing a live fox to his dogs. “I have never,” said the huntsman, “thrown a live cub to hounds. It is well known that this is bad for the hounds.”

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