Mr Cameron, NO tinkering with the Hunting Act We knew it was coming but we didn’t know what form it would take. Strong rumour has it that the pro blood sports Tory government is attempting to do some mega tinkering with the Hunting Act in order to allow a full pack of dogs to be used to flush foxes to waiting guns. The blighters are aware that a repeal vote will be soundly defeated, so they are planning to circumvent the legislation through a Parliamentary process known as a Statutory Instrument, or SI. If this debate does take place, it has been suggested it will fall on March 26th 2014, so we must be prepared. (Statutory Instruments (SIs) are a form of legislation which allows the provisions of an Act of Parliament to be subsequently brought into force or altered without Parliament having to pass a new Act.) David Cameron has always been keen to overturn the ban on hunting, especially the ban on hunting foxes with a pack of dogs, and in recent months there has been much speculation that a free vote on repeal would happen sometime this year before the general election in 2015. Fortunately almost all Labour MPs would vote against the idea of bringing cruelty back to the British countryside and a significant number of Lib Dem MPs would vote with Labour on the no repeal side of any debate. The Countryside Alliance weren’t happy that a repeal vote may have to be shelved because there was no hope of the blood sports party winning the vote, and as Mr Cameron had promised a free vote, a few of the more enlightened Tory MPs may have voted against repeal too. What to do? Such a dilemma for our leader. The media and the pro hunting set were out for his blood for not keeping his promise to give them back their dirty sport, and the anti-hunting lobby are campaigning like mad to keep the ban. The League Against Cruel Sports commissioned a national scientific poll which showed without a doubt that the vast majority of the general population do not want to see a return to hunting. One would think that such a result ( which showed our PM that over three quarters of those eligible to vote did not like his hunting stance) would be enough to cool the jets of those in power and put an end to the nonsense. (Especially with a country to run, an election to fight and trouble in the Ukraine.) Not a bit of it, Mr Cameron decided to try to bring hunting back by the back door with the use of a Statutory Instrument, which if successful, would insert a loophole into the existing legislation that would make it virtually impossible to enforce the ban on hunting with dogs. Of course the hunting fraternity was not sitting on its thumbs. They had to give Mr Cameron some kind of excuse to amend the Act. They came up with the Federation of Welsh Farmers Packs (FofWFP) who are claiming that foxes are breeding out of control and lamb predation is on the increase in the Welsh hills. And although the FofWFPs has produced absolutely NO verifiable evidence that foxes are killing lambs, or that their numbers are increasing, they claim that the only way to control these demon foxes is to be allowed to flush them out with a full pack of dogs.
It matters not that scientists have proven many times that foxes do not usually predate healthy lambs, they mostly just scavenge dead ones. Foxes are seen hanging round at lambing time because they eat the afterbirth not because they slaughter the new-borns. However, with the bit between their collective teeth, the FofWFPs went on to claim that last winter many more lambs than usual died at lambing time. The inference was it was starving foxes to blame, but they omitted to give the real reason for the lamb deaths which was an unusually hard winter with giant snow drifts and baltic temperatures which killed the tiny lambs in their hundreds. Foxes are expert at finding dinner under the snow and they certainly did not starve as they had plenty of frozen Welsh lamb to dig up out of the drifts. Let us pause for a moment and think just who the Federation of Welsh farmers Packs are? You might well ask because no one had heard of them before last year when on the 14th of October the Telegraph mentioned them in an article about two dogs not being enough to flush problem foxes. A vigilant member of the anti-hunting group ‘Save The Ban’ decided to do a bit of research into the FofWFPs and he came up with this, “The website consists of 4 simple webpages written in WordPress plus 2 PDFs and a spreadsheet. Now, you’d think such a powerful lobbying organisation which had been around for a while would have some information on the hunts that they represent and contacts within those individual packs, wouldn’t you? Compare this website to the Master of Foxhounds website (http://www.mfha.org.uk/), a similar organisation with similar aims which has information on every registered foxhunt in the UK and nearly 5MB of data representing just the basic webpages (excluding all the fancy graphics). Every responsible media person who covered this story should have been suspicious of this and started asking questions at this time. The strange thing is if you do a custom Google search for “Federation of Welsh Farmers’ Packs” between August this year (just before this story) and the entirety of history, you get no results. That’s right they have only just come into existence After doing some more custom searches I have found that there was a “Federation of Welsh Packs”, (note the absence of the word farmer) a group that has no website and has not been mentioned online since 2004 (except for cross links and directory listing), this group publically defended huntsmen accused of animal cruelty and speak on behalf of the ‘sport’ of hunting. A bit more digging and I find out whom the spokesperson for the group was, the mysterious ‘David Thomas’ The trail of suspicion does not stop here. I next visited “Whois” sites where one can find the registering details of anyone who owns a web domain (for example “fedwp.co.uk”). The owner of the FWFP website is none other than “Tim Garratt”, Now who is Tim Garratt? Tim Garratt is the web master for the Countryside Alliance and he has many domains registered in his name for that organisation.” Save The Ban also discovered that the spokesperson for the FofWFPs is none other than David Thomas of the Federation of Welsh Packs, a pro hunt group who have nothing to do with the Welsh hill farmers. If the Countryside Alliance, a London based organisation, is involved in this, it would explain why the Government is suddenly taking an interest. Some are claiming it’s more humane to chase a fox out of cover with a full pack of dogs. They have even got a pro hunting vet to write a report on it. The argument is that the chase time will be less and the time it takes to locate and flush a fox from cover will be considerably less too. That they expect us to accept the humane angle when the intent is to chase and kill a sentient British mammal for (let’s be honest) fun just beggars belief. Many people may view the proposed amendment as something not worth worrying about, and indeed this is the line the CA is pushing, but the ramifications for foxes and deer would be dire indeed.. Many hunts hunt illegally without the amendment to the hunting Act, and evidence is presented on social media on a daily basis of hunts breaking the law and walking away scott free. If the amendment is adopted, not only will hunting with a full pack of dogs return but it will be next to impossible to monitor the hunts or to prove that the poor fox or stag was savaged by the dogs instead of being humanely shot. The Government’s reason for attempting to change the law is flawed. It is based on hearsay and a trumped up set of statistics about fox predation on lambs. The flushing nonsense with a pack of dogs instead of the two dogs as the law stipulates at present, is nothing more than a badly thought out excuse to revisit the legislation. These people are clutching at straws, but unfortunately those in power are happy to collude with the weak evidence and the unsubstantiated claims of increased fox activity. We must stand together on this one. This Government must NOT be allowed to change the hunting Act in any way. There is a petition which needs a lot of signatures before the 26h of March. Please sign it and pass it on. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/58911 http://www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-information-office/l07.pdf http://savetheban.org/the-fox-hunting-ban-to-be-relaxed-due-to-a-dodgy-pr-stunt-which-is-completely-swallowed-and-supported-by-the-conservative-government-and-the-daily-telegraph/
1 Comment
eileen
3/22/2014 11:58:13 pm
The majority of people do not want this legalised animal cruelty back. Shame on Cameron.
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