ANOTHER UPDATE FROM THE HUNT SABS

 THIS SHOWS THE ARROGANCE OF FOX HUNTERS?

The stage was set: yet another huntsman in a long line of sheepish-looking bumpkins arrived at court to answer charges of illegal hunting. Journalists were prepped for a drawn-out trial, but suddenly the phrase “pleaded guilty” rippled through social media networks.

Eyebrows were raised across the board. While normally hunters would swear blind that they weren’t breaking the law until the very last gasp, against all odds the huntsman of one of the most famous hunts in the country – the Quorn of Leicestershire – held his hands up and admitted his guilt.

The reason swiftly became apparent. The evidence was stacked against him not only with hunt sabs filming his activity but by his own hand in years’ worth of messages containing admissions of guilt, stored on his own mobile phone which had been seized by police earlier in the year.

It seems the Quorn’s Mr Finnegan had not been paying attention to the infamous Hunting Office webinars, where ex-police office and hunt master Paul Jelley had advised hunters to carry burner phones for the purpose of concealing criminality:

So something for you hunt staff and terriermen, trail layers and everybody to consider, if you’re recording evidence for the Hunting Act, trail laying, whatever, don’t use the same phones or anything you’ve been using for social media and bragging about what you’ve been doing out hunting.”

Confronted by the stark reality that a huntsman had been hoisted by his own petard, the Hunting Office – now rebranded to the blander ‘British Hound Sports Association’ – were pressed for comment. Of course, to do anything other than to accept the court’s decision would have been monumentally self-defeating for the hunting bigwigs, so the second line of defence was wheeled out.

The BHSA stated to the press, “this matter has been referred to the Hound Sports Regulatory Authority” (HSRA). But what does this actually mean?

The HSRA are a body dreamt up in the wake of the webinars scandal: a desperate attempt to portray some sort of regulation of the terminally soiled world of hunting. The only hint as to the makeup of this body has been that they are formed from the old Hunting Office.

That would famously be the Hunting Office who were responsible for exposing the entire industry of hunting as one of corruption and ritualised animal abuse. The laughing sneer of Lord Mancroft as he advised to make sure that hunt followers weren’t recording while saying, “Isn’t it marvellous that they haven’t seen us because we’ve just caught a fox behind them” still echoes.

The formation of the HSRA was announced on 10th June 2022 and has had numerous instances of abuse ‘referred’ to it. However, at no point has the membership of this body been disclosed. The reason being, of course, either that the HSRA is made up of the same guilty hunters that the Hunting Office was, or even that it simply does not exist at all.

Unbelievably, less than twenty-four hours after his conviction for a “pattern of offending over a period of time” Finnegan had donned his red coat and was back out hunting foxes again in Cheshire. So much for being referred to the ‘Authority’: in any other industry an immediate suspension would have followed.

A HSA spokesperson commented, “It is clear that when hunters say that an incident is being referred to a body staffed by their own kind, they are of course just “marking their own homework”. No group of habitual lawbreakers such as fox hunters, can ever be trusted to monitor their own activity.

The only answer to this continued rural anarchy is a simple and straightforward outright ban on hunts and hunting kennels. They have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted, and now this abused trust needs to be withdrawn completely.”