Holidays in Heck Read online

  The staghounds and stag hunters trotted through a farmyard, and I followed on foot. Some local farmers are not hospitable to the traffic through their property—not hospitable, specifically, to the traffic of me. I was trying to take notes and make haste and avoid deep puddles and horse droppings, and I wasn’t wearing a necktie. “Is he all right?” I heard a farmer ask.

  “He thought you were an ‘anti,’” the retired grocer explained later. “They come around bothering the hunts.”

  According to a brochure from the League Against Cruel Sports, “The League . . . has collected an enormous amount of evidence of the cruelty of hunting. Years of undercover work and hunt monitoring has enabled [members of Parliament] to see the real face of hunting.”

  Beyond the farm, on the Exmoor upland, the real face of hunting was soaking wet. The scenery was an alluring frustration: heather-covered bosomy hill mounds rising above dark nests of woods. A green girlfriend of a landscape. But somebody else’s girlfriend, greeting the hunt with cold drizzle and sharp wind.

  This buoyed everyone’s spirits. The British manner of cheerfully not complaining can’t be maintained when there’s nothing to cheerfully not complain about. Forty horses ran across the moor. Stag hunting is not as show-offy as fox-hunting. There’s no jumping of ditches, hedges, and gates. Exmoor is wet through like a bath sponge; no use ditching it for drainage. The hedges are as high as tennis backboards and grow from stone heaps piled up since Roman times. And the farmers leave the gates open because some things are more important than keeping sheep in. I witnessed none of the hat-losing, horse-flipping spectacles seen in engravings on the walls of steak houses. And to be truthful, my entire knowledge of hunting on horseback has been gained by staring at such decor between courses. What sort of engravings will steak houses hang on the paneling 100 years hence? Pictures of people in Pilates classes?

  The excitement in stag hunting comes from the treacherous footing on the soaked, peat-slick moors and from the great length of the stag chase and the great speed of the stag’s run. It can also be dangerous just sitting on a horse. A young woman fell off while the hunt was gathered by the riverbank. A medical evacuation helicopter was called. The hunt was uninterrupted.

  The Exmoor stag hunters distribute a brochure, in Q&A form, arguing that stag hunting is not particularly inhumane. “Hunters” might well be substituted for “deer.”

  Q. But deer must be terrified by stag hunting!

  A. . . . Deer pay no more heed . . . than a grazing wildebeest (so often seen on TV) does to a pride of lions lunching off a mate nearby.

  I had been offered a tame mount on which to follow the hunt.

  “How tame?” I asked.

  “Very tame.”

  “There was,” I said, “a man who used to come through my neighborhood in the 1950s with a pony and a camera . . .”

  “Not that tame.”

  But I was inspired, watching the hunters dash around on the moor. The horses were beautiful, as tall as those that pull wagons in beer commercials but as gracefully made as what I’d lost fifty dollars on in last year’s Kentucky Derby. I vowed to learn to ride—as soon as they got the middle part of horses to be lower to the ground and had the saddles made by BarcaLounger.

  Wind, rain, and temperature grew worse. The hunt descended into a precipitous dell where I’d have thought the riders would have to walk their mounts. They didn’t. But I couldn’t even walk myself. I returned to where the hunt followers were gathered by the side of a road. The followers were disturbed. A pale and agitated young couple were walking down the road. Surely these were “antis.” They were dressed head to toe in black.

  But the boy and the girl were just lost backpackers who’d made the mistake of going out into nature for fun. The entertainments of nature are of a sterner kind. They were wet and miserable. The hunters were not, or didn’t feel that they were. But the stag and every trace of it had vanished, and the hunters decided to “pack it in, to spare the horses.”

  Michael, Adrian, and I headed back to Michael’s farm in his horse van, a bit disappointed. And then through the van windows came that music I’d been told about: the full cry of a pack. It is a bouillabaisse of a noise, with something in it of happy kids on a playground, honking geese headed for your decoys, and the wheee of a deep-sea fishing reel when you’ve hooked something huge. This particular music was being sung soprano. A beagle pack, thirty-some strong, was bounding across a pasture. We got out and hurried in the direction of the chase. Beagling is like foxhunting or stag hunting except that the quarry is hare, and it’s done without benefit of horses. Beaglers follow the pack—at a very brisk pace—on foot. Hunting hares with beagles is banned by the Hunting Act. But rabbits can still be hunted. “Because they’re considered pests,” Michael said. “Because of lot of Labour voters hunt rabbits,” Adrian said. Also, for some reason, “the hunting of a hare which has been shot,” is permitted.

  The pack arced away from us across a broad field. Just as it did, the hare that the beagles weren’t supposed to be hunting came at the three of us with a speed hardly credible in a land animal. If it had been less nimble (and bigger) it would have bowled us over. The dogs seemed to have lost the scent.

  “The hare went that way!” Michael shouted to the master of the beagle hounds.

  “The shot hare!” Adrian shouted.

  “You mean the ‘bush rabbit’!” the master shouted back. Interesting to wonder how many of the MPs voting for the Hunting Act would know a rabbit from a hare if it turned up in their Easter basket. Maybe on a menu.

  We spent an hour with the beagles. They no more got a bush rabbit than Michael and Adrian had got a stag, but the clambering and clamor of the beagles were a joy. I’m a strong advocate for animal rights. I am an animal. I belong to Animal NATO—us, dogs, horses (cats are France). And I belong to Animal WTO. We export feed to sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, and, to maintain the balance of trade, we eat them.

  The Thompsons gave a dinner that night. Their house was of Middlemarch era but with fewer old bores writing the Key to All Mythologies, and more stag heads on the walls. The main course was pork roast from a farm pig, rather than venison from the Exmoor stag (which in any case would have needed to hang for a week). Miscellaneous small terriers sat on guests’ laps.

  The consensus of the party was that the hunting ban had to do less with loving animals than with bullying people. This was not a class struggle, I was told. The working class was all for hunting, said one guest. And she was a Labour peer. Nor was it, she said (she herself proved the point) a Labour-Tory conflict. Instead, all agreed, a certain kind of today’s urban elite was getting its own back at what they saw as a traditional elite that had no use, as Michael Thompson put it, for people “with shaved heads and five earrings and their husbands just as bad.” But, all agreed again, hunts aren’t as posh as they used to be—and they never were.

  There’s truth to this, judging from the foxhunting prose laureate R. S. Surtees, who had his h-dropping London shopkeeper Jorrocks hunting with passion in the 1830s. Anthony Trollope wrote, “Surely no man has labored at it as I have done, or hunted under such drawbacks as to distances, money, and natural disadvantages. I am very heavy, very blind. . . . Nor have I ever been in truth a good horseman. . . . But it has been for more than thirty years a duty to me to ride to hounds.”

  The word “duty” must seem strange to people not involved in field sports, to today’s urban elites who don’t see the look on the dog’s face when the laptop instead of the gun cabinet is opened during bird season. Of course it’s tempting to think that the word “duty” always seems strange to modern urban elites.

  Still, in a way, the bullies are understandable. There’s a certain satisfaction in taking something away from people perceived as having been too certain and self-confident for too long, people who’ve dominated society but whose dominance is slipping away. Network news anchors come to mind.

  Then again, the bullies aren’t understandable. A
drian used to be the master of foxhounds for a hunt in northern England. At the annual hunt ball antis protested outside. “With balaclavas pulled down like the IRA,” said Adrian. “One told me, ‘We’ll smash up your car tonight, Adrian.’ They knew me by name. They didn’t smash my car. They broke every window in my house. I found my dog and her litter of pups covered in shards of glass.”

  Several of the other guests hunted foxes as well as stags. This was Thursday night. There was a big fox hunt on Saturday, and Sunday was Easter. Conversation turned to how to get Easter shopping done. Shopping on Good Friday was a bit inappropriate, wasn’t it? (There are no atheists in fox hunts.)

  The fox hunts were doing all right since the hunting ban. They’d taken up “drag hunting.” Someone rides ahead pulling cloth soaked in fox scent behind him. The hounds and the hunters follow his course. And if an actual fox pops up along the way . . . well, who can blame the dogs? Ninety-one foxes were killed on the first day of the hunting ban. But what will the country pub of the future be named? “The Something That Smells Like a Fox and Hounds”?

  Did the antis have, I asked, any moral point? Yes, a great point—of moral vanity. God didn’t make the world good enough for them. Cheese was served. Port was passed. Adrian quoted Surtees: “It’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty percent its danger.”

  In a nearly identical cultivated, sonorous voice Michael Hobday, spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sports, answered my questions a week later in London. The League Against Cruel Sports was founded in 1924, with antecedents dating to Hogarth’s The Four Stages of Cruelty. Here are a few of the League’s past presidents: Edith Sitwell, Lord Grey de Ruthyn, the Rt. Hon. Earl of Listowel, the Reverend Lord Soper. And a brochure published by the League shows how long and deep is the controversy in Britain about man and his relationship with the animals that are his friends, his relatives, and his dinner. In 1822 Britain passed a law against improper treatment of cattle, the first animal-welfare legislation in history. In 1835 Britain outlawed dogfighting, cockfighting, and bull, bear, and badger baiting. In 1929 the Labour Party adopted a platform plank opposing blood sports (although it held four parliamentary majorities before it fulfilled that campaign promise). “There’s a long history of criticism of hunting,” Mr. Hobday said. “The people who established the League Against Cruel Sports had a background in the humanitarian movement—animal suffering, welfare of children, prohibition.”

  I didn’t ask if the humanitarian movement had trouble prioritizing. I did ask, “Why the focus on hunting rather than, say, factory farming, with its animal penitentiaries?”

  “The reasons are twofold,” Mr. Hobday said. “Firstly, foxhunting is an emotive issue. The sight of the blood and gore tugs at the heartstrings. It makes powerful television. Secondly,” Mr. Hobday said, “hunting is done for entertainment. It’s a sport.”

  I asked why the law permitted hunting rabbits but not hares.

  “The League’s view is that cruelty to any animal in the name of sport is wrong. Parliament’s view was to make a distinction between activities that were ‘necessary’ and activities that were undertaken for sport. The Countryside Alliance has a vested interest in pointing out loopholes.”

  The Countryside Alliance is the principal British pro-hunting group. Apparently both the League and the Alliance enjoy majority support among the British public. According to a 1997 Gallup poll for The Daily Telegraph, 80 percent of Britons disapproved of hunting foxes with hounds. According to a 2004 ICM poll for The Sunday Telegraph, 70 percent of Britons believed the police should not enforce the hunting ban.

  I wanted to know why hunting (that is, chasing animals with dogs) was banned but shooting (pointing or flushing animals with dogs) wasn’t.

  “With shooting,” Mr. Hobday said, “there are clear steps that people can take to minimize suffering.”

  Being a better shot was the only one I could think of, and I’ve been trying for forty years to no avail.

  “Using a pack of dogs,” Mr. Hobday continued, “with the best will in the world you can’t do much about the cruelty. And in practical terms it’s impossible to have legislation that covers everything.”

  I asked if class conflict was involved in the hunting ban.

  “From our perspective,” Mr. Hobday said, “there’s no class element at all. Hare coursing is banned, though it’s working class.” (Hare coursing is letting greyhounds chase hares in a field—a sort of libertarian dog racing without the bother of a track,) “In the minds of ordinary people,” Mr. Hobday said, hunting is “not an issue of class but an issue of behavior. Hunters are seen to behave in a very arrogant fashion—hunts going through smallholdings and gardens. Hunters are very poor about apologizing. There’s an attitude of entitlement by hunters: ‘It’s our land and we have the right.’”

  And that, in America, would be all the apologizing needed. I mentioned how different America was—how Senator Kerry hadn’t been able to get through his presidential campaign without going on a goose hunt, so there’d be a photo of him holding a gun.

  “But not a goose,” Mr. Hobday said.

  Mr. Hobday told me an anecdote, though he said he couldn’t vouch for it personally. Someone on the League’s staff had told it to him. At a protest against foxhunting, before the ban, one of the protesters had gone up to a hunter and said, “We’re going to make what you do illegal.”

  The hunter looked down from his horse and said, “People like you obey the law. People like us make the law.”

  This is an anecdote contradicted by what I saw in Exmoor, and exactly opposite to what has happened legislatively, but it still makes good telling. If you understand it, you may understand what’s going on in Britain. I don’t.

  I walked from the offices of the League Against Cruel Sports, in Southwark, to the nearby Tate Modern, to look at the works of Damien Hirst. He is the artist who has floated a sheep in formaldehyde and sliced a cow into sections and so forth for the sake of sculpture. He is a today’s-urban-elite kind of artist—cutting edge, one might say. Unfortunately, the Tate Modern had only one piece by Hirst on display: some seashells with a curator’s commentary on the wall beside them:

  “You kill things to look at them,” Hirst has said. In this work he arranges a selection of ornate shells, purchased in Thailand, inside a glass cabinet. Resembling a museum display case [for Pete’s sake, it was a museum display case], it alludes to the 19th century tradition of collecting and classifying natural specimens. Inevitably, the approach involves removing plants and animals from their natural habitats, killing them in order to preserve them . . .

  But Hirst was not buying seashells for sport.

  In the grassy median of Park Lane, near Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner, is the Animals in War memorial—“Unveiled 24 November 2004 by Princess Anne.” Its two sweeping curves of concrete wall resemble parts of a non-Euclidian traffic barrier. On the inside of one curve is carved THEY HAD NO CHOICE. Bronze pack mules march toward the gap between the walls. Beyond the gap a bronze dog and a bronze horse walk away, metaphorically in heaven, though actually farther up Park Lane. A eulogy mentions even pigeons. No need to cast one in bronze, though, with so many live ones alighting on the monument.

  Here are some British newspaper items I collected on my visit:

  A leading cancer charity has rejected a £30,000 donation from the organizer of sponsored bird shoots because it does not approve of the way the money was raised.

  —The Sunday Telegraph, March 20

  Professor John Webster, emeritus professor at Bristol University, discussed the intelligence of chickens at a conference organized by Compassion in World Farming. . . . They are intelligent, sensitive characters.

  —The Times, March 31

  Nine New Forest firefighters were involved in freeing a frog from the spout of a watering can. A gardener took the trapped frog to the fire station. . . . It was released after half an hour’s vigorous cutting with a hacksaw.


  —The Times, March 28

  As for the well-being of people:

  A middle-aged teacher is starting a six-month jail sentence today because she decided to fight back against “yobs” with a pellet gun. Linda Walker, 47, . . . was being driven towards breaking point by groups of youth “terrorizing” her neighborhood. . . . She rushed out of her house at night to confront a knot of teenagers. . . . After an exchange of abuse . . . Mrs. Walker squared up to one 18-year-old, firing off several rounds from the [compressed air-powered] pistol into nearby ground. . . . Mrs. Walker was found guilty of affray and possessing a firearm with intent to cause fear of violence.

  —The Times, March 30

  Of course, there’s always the possibility that barmy Britannia—or a certain political part of her—is crazy like a . . .

  The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics. Politicians don’t exactly want to ban hunting or forbid shooting teen goons with BBs. Politicians just want to turn everything, right down to what the dog chases, into a political matter. And they’ve succeeded. The day I arrived in Britain Tony Blair was beginning his run for reelection. The campaign issue making headlines was school lunch menus.

  Ordinary people have ordinary knowledge: how to make things (including lunch), grow things, fix things, build things, and, for that matter, kill things. Politicians have extraordinary knowledge: how all things ought to be. Never mind that politicians do not, as it were, run with the hare or hunt with the hounds.