FOX HUNTS are closing and amalgamating at an unprecedented rate. Those who do manage to get out hunting are running short of social climbers willing to pay for the privilege. This has led to an extraordinarily high turnover of hunt staff (the people who do the actual hunting) with many leaving the sinking ship.
 
A recent expose of fox hunting on Channel 4 news saw a senior police officer say: “One side is trying to prevent something illegal, the other side is intent on perpetuating illegal activity.” In light of the history of this conflict, that is an extraordinary turnabout.
 
Hunting is, along with being a practice of enormous cruelty, a ritual of supremacy for the landed gentry. Once regularly attended by royalty, it is the sport of aristocrats. The feudal hierarchy of the countryside is paraded with everyone from the masters to the foot supporters dressed appropriately to their status.
 
The first recorded act of deliberate hunt sabotage by activists (and arguably the birth of the whole global animal rights movement) happened in a field in Devon in 1963, against a backdrop of anti-Vietnam war and anti-apartheid protests. Within a year the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) was formed.
 
After a period of wild experimentation including the use of smoke flares and the hurling of meat to the hounds, hunt sabbing settled into a pattern, as sabs (always “sabs” never “sabbers”) learned how hunting worked and used those methods against the sport — for example, learning the use of the hunting horn to confuse hounds and take them away from their prey.
 
Sabs organised themselves into small self-reliant groups based in certain areas and covering certain hunts. If you’ve never been out then it’s been likened by some long-time practitioners as being “like full contact orienteering.”

With sab groups, many from universities, heading into the countryside to challenge the squirearchy it was hardly surprising that this was met first with violence, then a state crackdown, with arrest becoming a routine aspect of a hunt saboteur’s life.

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The 1980s saw an increase in the numbers and militancy of the sabs, as disrupting fox hunts draped in the foetid rags of anarcho-punk became the pastime of a counterculture.

Sabs confronted and saw off new police powers granted under the Public Order Act 1986. Two saboteurs were killed in the early nineties, Mike Hill and Tom Worby.

The Tory response to the escalating violence against those protecting wildlife was a clause in the notorious Criminal Justice Act 1994. The new offence of “aggravated trespass,” (namely the trespass on private land with the aim to disrupt a lawful activity) — was aimed squarely at the sabs, referred to as “thugs, wreckers and bullies” by then Home Secretary Michael Howard.
 
Coming to light more recently has been the infiltration of the so-called spycops. As sabbing was so deeply embedded in resistance to all aspects of the ruling-class agenda, becoming an active sab gave the undercovers a useful jump-off point to get further involved in ecological movements, anti-fascism and the increasingly militant animal liberation movement.

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For 10 years sabs fought increasing criminalisation with police forces deploying colossal resources to protect the blood sport. In just one example, codenamed Operation Rook, Sussex Police were deploying 80 officers and resources, including a helicopter, every weekend during the hunting season to protect three fox hunts. Hundreds of arrests were made and many were convicted.
 
In 1999 Tony Blair was ambushed with a question on live TV and promised to introduce a ban on hunting with hounds. He subsequently admitted he hadn’t wanted to and that the idea was to placate backbenchers.

The 2004 Hunting Act, after an astounding 700 hours of parliamentary debate, and a riot outside the House of Commons by radicalised bumpkins, did ban hunting with hounds. The Act itself is, despite the protestations of the fox-hunting lobby, pretty straightforward: hunting foxes or hares for sport with dogs is against the law.
 
The entrenched privilege of the landowning set didn’t disappear overnight though. What did mysteriously vanish were the police resources devoted to fox hunting, as, oddly, it stopped being a priority.

Fox hunts who’d vowed they’d never stop whatever the law, did in fact carry on, under the guise of “trail hunting” — by pretending to chase a scent, they were able to carry on hunting live animals. The terriermen, whose job is to dig out live foxes for further sport, have no role whatsoever in legal trail hunting, yet not a single hunt dismissed them.

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However, one very important effect of the new Act was to effectively decriminalise sabbing. With the heavy hand of the law absent, the HSA began adding to its traditional repertoire of tactics. Actively filming and monitoring fox hunts for breaches of the Act became the most effective way of disrupting the hunts.

There were other high-profile cases brought by the League Against Cruel Sports and the RSPCA, but the week-in, week-out work was done by volunteers with the HSA. 

The numbers of new volunteers into the HSA were swelled by the new animal rights groups such as Save Animals From Exploitation and the Extinction Rebellion spin-off Animal Rising. Others became aware of sabbing due to the widespread opposition to the Tory badger cull, one tactic of which was to wander the countryside at night doing “wounded badger patrols,” which led to familiarity with more direct tactics.
 
Under pressure, the hunters tried to come up with various scams to get around the risk of being caught. In a display of credulity-defying stupidity, in August 2020 the Hunting Office organised a series of webinars on how to get around the Act. The webinars were attended by around 150 hunt masters and addressed by a series of grandees — and an ex-police officer.

Mark Hankinson, director of the Master of Foxhounds Association pulled the trigger on the shot to hunting’s foot: “It’s a lot easier to create a smokescreen if you’ve got more than one trail layer operating and that is what it’s all about, trying to portray to the people watching that you’re going about legitimate business.”
 
A recording of the webinars was obtained by the HSA. With the frank admission of a conspiracy to perjury and illegality, Hankinson was convicted in October 2021 of intentionally encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence under the Hunting Act 2004 (although this was later overturned).
 
Following this debacle, large landowning bodies like the National Trust and Forestry Commission began to withdraw permission for trail hunting on their land. Hunt saboteurs then began to turn their attention to depriving the hunts of other country, combing the land registry to point out to landowners that they were now facilitating illegality. The area of land available to hunts shrunk again.
 
Three hunting seasons on from the webinars, sabs are still regularly finding and disrupting fox hunts. Over 60 groups now operate across Britain. The use of drones in particular has given them a whole new evidence-gathering capacity, which along with the skilful use of social media, means that hunting barely has time to recover from one scandal before being engulfed in another.

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Successful campaigning efforts in Scotland have meant the wholesale redrafting of the law on hunting with hounds there. The Hunting with Dogs (Scotland) Act came into force in October 2023: it explicitly banned trail hunting. One of Scotland’s most prestigious hunts folded immediately, and two others converted to drag hunting (chasing a quad bike — this is harder to use as a disguise for hunting live foxes).
 
With an election in the offing and a right-wing Labour Party looking to score any cheap points that might mark it out from the Tories, it’s possible that a Scottish-style ban might finally be granted in England and Wales. If the sport of fox hunting does finally blow for home, then British wildlife will have the hunt saboteurs to thank.

John Lilburne is the editor of Howl, the magazine of the Hunt Saboteurs Association — www.huntsabs.org.uk.