WHEN THE New Forest was new in 1079, William the Conqueror hunted pretty much anything he liked there, including (but not limited to) boar, stag, buck and probably the occasional peasant. Today we are indeed hunting humans but they have volunteered to be hunted. One of them, Will Day, is Joint Master of the New Forest Hounds pack of bloodhounds.
As Day says: “That makes me MBH, Master of Bloodhounds. Hmm, that’s exciting.” He, like the rest of the Hunt, is just getting used to being a bloodhound pack, as they only made the conversion in the autumn of 2022. The New Forest Hounds were originally established in 1791 as a foxhound pack, and through the course of more than 200 years the pack has had to be resilient to any number of changes. The inclosures of the New Forest for timber production for the British Navy in 1851 were just the beginning of many land management regulations imposed by the Crown and administered today by Forestry England. Then came the Hunting Act of 2004, and the New Forest Hounds successfully changed to trail hunting, until controversy about trail hunting meant Forestry England suspended the Hunt’s licence from 2021.
Joint Master Tom Blachford remembers that stressful time: “Basically
