Fantastic news is coming in before the 2024/25 hunting ‘season’ even starts: the Monmouthshire and Valley Beagles (M&VB), which used to hunt hares, has disbanded.
The M&VB itself was formed from the amalgamation of two separate beagle packs in 2015, the Merthyr Tydfil-based Valley Beagles and the Monmouthshire Beagles. The hunt chased and killed Brown Hares in the valleys and hill country of Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire. Now it is gone.
The hare hunting packs are falling one by one, but this still leaves 50 beagle packs in England and Wales.
Beagling
Beagling is hare hunting with hounds carried out on foot. Protect the Wild’s Glen Black has previously explained what happens during a meet:
“Hares are faster than beagles, so the intention of the hunt is not to outrun the hare. Instead, as in stag hunting, the aim is usually for the pack to exhaust the hare before killing it. A single chase may last anywhere between just a few minutes up to several hours, although it’s more often than not likely to be at the lower end of this range. Much of this time will be spent across open fields, although hares will run through woodland, hedgerows and other coverts if necessary.”
Plenty of reasons for hunts folding
We have seen numerous hunts disbanding over the past couple of years, and there are many different reasons why.
The first is the most obvious: that public support for hunting is at an all-time low. It can be expensive to keep a hunt afloat and subscriptions, caps and donations are likely to be decreasing across the country as people realise that the gruesome bloodsport has no place in modern-day society.
Adding to the pressure is the direct action of hunt saboteurs and monitors on the ground, who succeed in making life as difficult as possible for hunts to carry out their illegalities. Groups like sabs and monitors not only expose hunting through videos and eyewitness accounts, they also prevent kills, making hunt supporters more and more disillusioned as it’s the kill they pay to see.
Hunts have also found it more difficult to find land to actually hunt on since the Mark Hankinson scandal of 2020/2021. Hankinson is the former head of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, who was tried and convicted of encouraging others to illegally hunt after private Zoom webinars were leaked to the public. After the conviction, we finally saw a number of the UK’s biggest landowners taking note: they banned hunting. Public bodies such as Forestry England, Natural Resources Wales and the National Trust all announced they’d stop licensing trail hunting – a notable exception being the Ministry of Defence which still refuses to recognise the wildlife crimes taking place on its land. Hankinson’s conviction was overturned in 2022, but the damage had been done.
And this month the General Election saw Labour coming into power. Overnight hunting lost its base of support amongst Tory politicians. In the run-up to the election, the Labour had pledged to ban hunting, and – taking a leaf out of Scotland’s book where in 2o23 Holyrood passed a new law banning hunting with dogs and closing loopholes such as trail hunting – it also promised to close the loopholes that enable hunts to break the law in England and Wales. The new government’s huge majority has sent the hunting industry into panic. For those hunts that are already demoralised and struggling with lack of support and money, this ‘final nail’ might already be leading hunt staff to call it a day.
We predict more hunts folding in 2024
At the end of 2023, Protect the Wild celebrated that a number of hunts had either folded or amalgamated in the UK over the year.
We will, no doubt, see more hunts folding in 2024 as the industry hopefully keeps heading towards certain death – despite the desperate plans of industry lobbyists. The BHSA are organising what it hopes will be huge rallies in September to ‘prove’ to the public that hunting is legal, cuddly, cute fun. Look out for them to cynically exploit children and dogs pulling on the heartstrings as the organisation has sent instructions out to its members saying:
“We want Beagles and Harriers to attend. Pictures of children and Beagles make the front page.“
They will need to convince the now hostile, anti-hunt politicians who took power in the General Election that hunts are all ‘trail hunting’ after years of breaking the law though. And that’s something hunts are simply incapable of doing…
- Now (as we and other campaign organisations repeatedly say) is not the time to ease up though. Protect the Wild will keep fighting hard. We will keep reminding the Labour Party of its pledge and rebutting the baseless claims of pro-hunt lobbyists that ‘the countryside’ wants to be allowed to kill wildlife with dogs.
