Hunting

So, the UK government has won its vote to abolish the hunting of foxes with dogs. The Prime Minister has promised to push the bill through the House of Lords and make it law despite their objections. I find myself oddly disagreeing with this. Not for liberal reasons or civil rights reasons or because “it’s traditional”. Rather, I think it’s a symptom of the “civilised” approach to life. We city types sometimes find it hard to reconcile our sanitised lifestyles with the real world. Food doesn’t just appear in supermarkets wrapped in plastic. Somewhere, there are animals living on farms that are then killed, cut up and shipped off to us. There are huge fields growing single crops for our convenience, at the cost of fertilisers, pesticides and loss of habitat for everything else.

I think that it’s no bad thing for us to be reminded that life requires death; for us to live requires something else to die, whether that’s a plant or an animal (and, for most of us, that does mean both). This requires that we respect both our food and the countryside that produces it. More than that, why should city people be surprised that people who live closer to the reality of food production don’t share our rosy-eyed view of things, or our maudlin sentimentality about “Nature”. If we once accept either that people need to keep the fox population down or that our pleasure (whether that’s culinary or sporting) can legitimately come at the expense of another creature, anything else is simply a discussion of methods and those who don’t take part can have little say.
Is it better for an animal to live in a countryside that provides it with food until it is itself killed by something else, or to live where it will instead be killed with poisoned bait, or never to have the chance to live at all because the countryside is “managed” into uniformity?
Is it better for us to live in a world where we never see beyond the supermarket shelves to the human and animal lives that lie behind our shopping and cooking? Or is it better for us to live in such a way that life and death are accepted parts of that world?

pax et bonum

Article posted at 09:19am on 22 September 2004
Category: Musing, Politics, General