15/08/2026
“THE PEACE AND BEAUTY OF THE MORNING WAS DESTROYED”
This powerful piece from a leading hunt monitor who's first hunt they ever monitored was way back in the early 1990s, and it was a cub hunt.
"It was a cool autumn morning, a lovely morning, a morning when appreciation of nature was the only thing I wanted to experience. Instead I was on my way to witness one of the cruellest forms of animal abuse then still legal in this country.
I will never forget the turmoil I felt - I was shaking with apprehension and dread.
I and my fellow monitors found the hunt quickly, and I heard them before I saw them. Echoing from within a wood came the blood chilling sound of baying hounds. As the hunt came into view I saw riders and foot followers spaced out around the perimeter of the wood. Some of the riders were slapping their riding crops against their saddle or riding boots, muttering “Aye aye aye Charlie”, the foot followers were clapping their hands and making guttural sounds, These are techniques used to frighten fleeing foxes back into the wood - and the teeth of the hounds. Whoops came from within the wood, mingling with the terrifying sound of the hounds in cry. Intermittently the hunting horn was blown in upbeat, rapid notes - the hounds were being urged on to the young foxes.
So on an idyllic English morning the peaceful life of a family of young foxes was turned into a scene from hell. A scene of terror and cruelty.
Suddenly a fox ran out of the wood, and a rider charged towards it to try and turn it back. One of the most callous moments I had ever seen. The fox however continued to run, and a young woman on a horse, quite close to me, shouted “Gone away” loudly, informing the Huntsman a fox had broken cover. A monitor stationed at the nearby disused railway radioed through to say the fox had run along the line and had escaped.
Its siblings were not so lucky, As the hunt finally moved out of the wood, a quad bike was driven out by the terrier man, and behind him on the bike was a black plastic bag clearly containing the pitiful remains of the foxes the hounds had caught. Over the years I have seen so many of those sinister black bags. As the hunt moved on to another covert, to terrorise and kill more young foxes, they left behind them total devastation. Parent foxes may have also been killed in the onslaught, or else would return to find the ground smeared with the blood and entrails of their cubs. The peace and beauty of the morning was destroyed. Fear lay in the air, shock and horror, the smell of blood and the destruction of innocence.
If you are looking at this page you most likely know that cub hunting is the period from August to November when the young hounds, that have just joined the pack, are trained to “be savage with their fox”. All the old hunting books make no bones about this - no whitewash, no “autumn hunting” substituted name to make it sound less dreadful in these old books, just the callous facts, described without a shred of pity for the victims..
The scandal is that this barbarity continues to this day, despite the fact that it has been illegal now for 21 years. Anyone looking at a cub hunt today with see the exact same scene as I saw all those years ago - and have seen countess times since.
Make no mistake - all aspects of fox hunting continue today exactly as they have been conducted for the last couple of centuries. I have watched hundreds and hundreds of hunts both pre and post ban, and there is absolutely no difference.
We are now in a situation where further curbing of hunting is imminent. A ban on non-existent “trail hunting” will be nowhere near enough. All loopholes must go and the law must become draconian if it is to end this butchery.
Do everything you can, write to anyone you can, to keep the pressure up on the Government to do the right thing. I call on Andy Burnham to go and see a few hunts for himself - he will come away shocked and appalled, and then hopefully he will use his power to end it once and for all."
