THE FIRST bill to ban hunting with dogs was put before Parliament in 1948. For 56 years groups of fixated MPs pursued their quarry relentlessly and finally, in 2004, the infamous Hunting Act was passed. The stubborn and brilliant defence carried out by the Countryside Alliance and its predecessor the British Field Sports Society (BFSS), not forgetting the hunting community as a whole for half a century, did not stop when the new law came into force. Despite all the difficulties presented by the Act, not to mention the additional challenges of operating any pack of hounds in our shrinking and increasingly crowded countryside, hunts refused to fold and found a way of operating under the new law.
This created a real problem for the animal-rights movement and the political Left, which had argued for the ban on the spurious basis that it would improve animal welfare but was, in fact, driven as least as much by its prejudice against the hunting community. For reasons that have never really been clear,
