British fox-hunting, past and present. (Society).

'Unting is all that's worth living for--all time is lost wot is not spent in 'unting--it is like the hair we breathe--if we have it not we die--it's the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent of its danger!

--from Mr Jorrocks' first Sportin' Lector in Robert Surtees' Handley, Cross

MR JORROCKS' sentiments would be considered immoral rather than immortal by most people today. Fox-hunting is on a par, in public regard in Britain, less with warfare than with soccer hooliganism. Opinion polls consistently report a large majority in favour of banning hunting; the House of Commons has voted overwhelmingly to carry out the public will. Foxhunting appears indefensible because foxes meet an unpleasant death and, despite some research to the contrary, it seems likely that they are distressed by its preliminaries. It can thus be considered unethical on at least two counts: the suffering of the pursued and the desire to kill a non-human animal (to use the jargon of the animal rights movement) for sport that animates the pursuers. It appears morally equivalent to blood sports such as bearbaiting and cockfighting that have been illegal for some two centuries.

Even so, there are some differences between such activities and fox-hunting that prompt at least a sentimental plea for fox-hunting, as it existed in the past and (at least I hope) in the present. For one thing, unlike bears and cocks, foxes are vermin. They are indiscriminate killers themselves and, under the common law, every human hand has always been against them. For another, and unlike the sports now illegal, human pleasure in the hunt does not arise from the suffering of the fox. This is merely an unfortunate side-effect. And there are other legal and ethical arguments that can be deployed in its defence.

The main defence presently to be deployed against the threat of public sanctions is that fox-hunting is an activity freely pursued by individuals that does not impact adversely on other humans. It is possible to take this argument a step further. Although ethics and ethical systems are notoriously variable and mutable, it remains the orthodoxy, in the West at least, that a degree of suffering for a non-human animal is acceptable if it contributes to the good of human society as a whole. Adopting this premise, it will be argued below that, in the past, fox-hunting represented a public good and that there remains scope for it to do so today.

The sociologist Norbert Elias uses the evolution of fox-hunting to illustrate what he calls the "civilizing process" in European history. According to Elias, growing social complexity led to a growth in refinement of manners, to greater self-control over sexuality and violence--and an emphasis "on prolonging the pleasure of the anticipatory process". He charts the evolution of fox-hunting to the eighteenth century, when not only was the pleasure of the chase prolonged, the fox was no longer killed by humans. Hounds, whose function had been to find and put up the prey, and which were bred specifically for this purpose, became the instruments of its death.

It could be argued, accepting the thesis and taking it to a logical conclusion, that the next step would be for the field to follow a drag (an artificial scent) rather than a fox. The representatives of hunting reject this on various grounds that include the end of "glorious uncertainty" and the reduction of the hunt to a mere steeplechase. In any case, however, Elias's thesis is not entirely convincing. Fox-hunting certainly became highly stylised by the eighteenth century, bound by elaborate conventions and rules. However, this was as much due to external constraints as to internal restraint. For one thing, the increasing intensity of agriculture meant, firstly, that there was little else to hunt over large parts of the country, and secondly that hunting had to be over arable and pasture rather than through waste and woodland.

Nor is the evidence for increased refinement entirely convincing. A subdued lust for killing was hardly a feature of the other country sport, shooting game birds, favoured by the landed elite. Rather, as guns improved the emphasis became on the size of the bag of birds killed. Heavy investment was made in the nineteenth century in rearing thousands of pheasants for leisured slaughter in the battue.

The contrasting trends in the two sports were dramatic in fact and, for the historian, point to a paradoxical feature of the present animus against fox-hunting. While the one (shooting) was and is necessarily exclusive, the other (hunting) was and is equally necessarily inclusive. The enjoyment of shooting could only be achieved by keeping the rest of the community at arm's length; hence the infamous Game Laws. However, the pleasures of fox-hunting were, in more than theory, open to all. It was the first sport in which women participated as equals, and they did so in increasing numbers in the nineteenth century. Social class was no bar; farmers and any tradesmen who possessed a horse, which they often did, could join. Even the rural poor could and did attend the meet and some then followed on foot--or on bicycle by the end of the century.

While the actual composition of the hunt naturally took on a hierarchical nature that reflected the realities of rural society, inclusiveness was never entirely a myth in the field and, more generally, operated at a variety of levels. Thus, only the most affluent Master of Fox Hounds, as in the case of the Duke of Rutland, could afford to hunt entirely at his own expense, and even he needed the support of other land-owners, small as well as large. The hunt might seem to cross land in indiscriminate fashion, but owners had the legal right to bar access. Further, maintaining an ample supply of foxes required at least a partial creation of their favoured habitat. Landowners who did not hunt were still expected to plant and maintain gorse coverts. And the active support of other classes was just as crucial.

The goodwill of farmers was most important. They suffered the most in direct losses from foxes and the hunt, and financial compensation from the hunt for crop and hen losses was usually a necessity. With foxes seemingly in short supply in many areas throughout the nineteenth century (one authority claims thousands were imported from France up to the 1840s), their forbearance from reacting to such losses by taking matters into their own hands was just as critical. And, with no legal restriction on vulpicide (killing foxes by means other than hounds) possible, the hunt needed the support of the whole rural society.

All the evidence suggests that this was forthcoming, and with enthusiasm. While shooting was hated by the mass of the rural population, and the Game Laws universally flouted, they took a benign and active interest in the hunt. Information was always forthcoming on the whereabouts of a fox before the hunt, or when the hounds lost their line. The meet and the hunt provided a dash of colour in the lives of all during the otherwise drab British winter.

CERTAINLY, inclusivity and participation pervade the celebratory literature of hunting, one that is larger and more distinguished than for any other sport, even cricket. From the days of Nimrod, in the early nineteenth century, no sporting magazine or local newspaper (even when Radical in persuasion) was complete without accounts of hunting. Fox-hunters took pride in the peculiarly British nature of their sport, one that bemused foreigners like Conan Doyle's Brigadier Gerard and Trollope's American Senator. But Trollope also sought deliberately to emphasise the class-binding role of hunting--something that emerges more naturally in two of the great hunting texts.

At "the centre of the stories" in Somerville and Ross's Experiences of an Irish R.M., "stands the hunt, a point where irreconcilable worlds come together". Rulers and ruled in the West of Ireland, that "Elysium of fox-hunting", unite in support of Flurry Knox, a Master of indeterminate social standing who can relate (and is related) to both. As for the orphaned Siegfried Sassoon, hunting and hunting people provided an escape from introspection and diffidence. No one has ever written better prose about any sport than Sassoon in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

And then there is Surtees. While Somerville and Ross and Sassoon are still accessible to the contemporary reader, it is possible that Suttees is not. Large parts of Handley Cross and his other novels are unreadable, other parts incomprehensible. However, Sassoon came to hunting through Surtees, and he remains the bible for the literary fox-hunter, the creator of a world peopled by rogues, villains and fools--and of one of the great comic characters of English literature. However, while the name of Jorrocks still has resonance today, it may be for the wrong reasons.

A Goodies skit of the 1980s pilloried Jorrocks as the classic evil squire, vicious to his servants and dedicated to the slaughter of wild animals. This may be the result of ignorance; Sassoon found the gap between his fox-hunting and intellectual friends to be unbridgeable. However, John Jorrocks was in fact a Cockney grocer (witness his dropped aspirates) whose love of 'unting (despite his cowardice confronted with a bullfinch--a combined hedge and ditch) compensates for his (multiple) vices. And the mistake (if it was one) has a significance that goes beyond mere ignorance.

Even in the nineteenth century, fox-hunting and the Game Laws never lacked critics, not out of concern over fox or bird welfare but because of antipathy to the landed elite. Such antipathy was understandable; the landed classes wielded real power (even if not, as witness the repeal of the Corn Laws, always to their own direct advantage). They do not today, and if Britain remains a class-ridden society it is less because of any remaining deference in society than the continued vigour of inverted snobbery.

It is an unpleasant irony that this lingering antagonism finds its focus in hunting rather than shooting. This arises because, given the contrasting requirements of the sports, hunting remains an overt public activity while shooting is still private. It also reflects the massive changes to the environment within which hunting now takes place.

Victorian fox-hunters bemoaned constraints such as railways and barbed wire. Their modern counterparts face much worse, being hemmed in by the spread of suburbia, by motorways and the remorseless growth of traffic on ordinary roads (although so is the fox). Worst of all is the spread of arable at the expense of pasture, as a result of the iniquitous Common Agricultural Policy, to the partial ruin of the great hunting countries of the Quorn and the Pytchley. And the same trends have also led to the death of the society that traditionally supported hunting. Squires and parsons are virtually extinct, as are farm labourers and most of the traditional rural trades and occupations. Of the old rural triumvirate only the farmer is left, if greatly reduced in number, to provide the backbone of the modern hunt. Conversely, the fox itself is in no danger of extinction, having adapted successfully to the exigencies of modern farming and suburban sprawl.

Nevertheless, fox-hunting continues to thrive, with some 280,000 active participants today. It does so because it appeals to many outside of that traditional society; there have always been townspeople, like Mr Jorrocks, who love to hunt. And today, the future of fox-hunting lies in their hands; there is no going back to the old rural society. The leadership of the hunting fraternity still tends to be drawn from the remnants of that society which, naturally enough, sees itself as beleaguered, the inevitable victim of an ignorance that cannot be corrected. But they need now to call on the proudest tradition of the sport and take a firm stand.

The benign tradition of inclusiveness enabled Jorrocks to achieve his greatest worldly ambition. "Of all sitivations under the sun, none is more enviable, more 'onerable than that of a master of fox-'ounds. Talk of a M.P.! vot's an M.P. compared to an M.F.H.?" What the modern countryside needs are more figures who feel like Jorrocks. The future lies with fugitives from the town. Like Mr Jorrocks, urban migrants have three valuable characteristics. They want to live in the countryside, they enjoy country pursuits and they have money. They also represent a potential bridge to the wider community, a means of overcoming an outmoded class antagonism that remains the greatest threat to the British hunt.

John Fisher teaches in the School of Policy at the University of Newcastle (in New South Wales).