Press gallery

Contents of this Staghunting Press Gallery:-

Observer Colour Magazine January 24 1982

The Mail on Sunday October 26 2003

Items are in date order.

OBSERVER COLOUR MAGAZINE

24 JANUARY 1982

“WEARIED IN THE CHASE

Stags take to water when they can no longer keep ahead of the hounds. The cruelty of the chase incenses anti-blood sports campaigners. Yet stag hunts, like this one on Exmoor, have their defenders among conservationists who argue that a strong hunt will keep deer numbers down and protect herds from poachers. But can the primitive ritual of the chase ever be justified? ENA KENDALL reports.

Some of its opponents call stag-hunting the bullfight of England.

The comparison is not as far-fetched as it seems. Like the bullfight, stag-hunting maintains its age-old grip and continues to pull in the crowds. On a good day, the Devon and Somerset Stag-Hounds - largest of the three West Country stag-hound packs - hunting over 450 square miles of Exmoor, can attract 200 riders and close on 1,000 car-borne followers. 'Stag-hunting is terribly popular,' Mrs Nora Harding, joint master of the Devon and Somerset, says. 'People from all parts of England bring their horses here to hunt as part of their holidays. Others drive tremendously long distances to follow by car or motorbike.'

Like the bullfight, the stag-hunt is helped out by visitors' money - drivers turning up for a meet chip in at least £1 each to roadside collectors or 'car cappers' in return for a hunt windscreen sticker - but the chief resemblance is an historical one. Both are ancient rites, their roots running deep in the societies that nourish them. Stag-hunting is not only a sport but a nexus of Exmoor life, crossing social boundaries and reflecting the unsentimental values of an agricultural community. As lan Pedler, League Against Cruel Sports man at Bristol, says: 'Exmoor is like going back 200 years. It's a closed community, isolated for long stretches of the year by bad weather. They are a strange tribe and stag-hunting is part of a primitive ritual. On the Quantocks, public execution of stags causes more of an outcry - the villages contain a lot of people who have moved in from the towns. It's a smaller area, surrounded by civilisation.'

Public the execution may be, but the customers are not guaranteed a ringside view of it. The kill may take place when many of the followers are straggling miles behind on the moor or blocked in traffic-choked country lanes. Some riders never stay to see the stag 'accounted for', as the hunting reports coyly describe it, though some of the most eager watchers are children, as Britain's largest and most majestic wild mammal, paradigm of nervous beauty, meets its end.

In contrast with fox-hunting, which is random, stag-hunting is selective. The night before, a harbourer (literal meaning, a shelterer or protector) goes into a wood where the deer are known to lie up and picks out a huntable stag.

'We try to cull the least attractive ones,' Mrs Harding says. 'You'll occasionally find one with only one horn, for instance.' The harbourer reports the stag's whereabouts to the master of hounds as the meet assembles, around mid-morning. About nine (four-and-a-half couple, in hunt parlance) of the more experienced hounds, known as tufters, are sent into the wood to put up the stag and get him running in the open to where the main pack has been taken by van and is waiting to be laid on.

The stag does not always collaborate. One wet Tuesday, when 50 riders and nearly 200 followers defied the dreary weather to meet at West Buckton, the quarry was elusive. Riders hung around the fringe of a wood for two hours while the tufters drew it, faintly giving voice from time to time. 'They'm spoke,' an elderly countryman said, shaking his head, 'but they ain't very enthusiastic.' The stag, a big old fellow with beautiful antlers, was glimpsed once or twice in clearings and whistles blasted through the air to signal sightings, but he lay low. Up on a ridge, a group of spectators snapped shut their seat sticks and took their flasks of coffee back to their steamed-up cars. That day, the scent was bad, hunting was slow and the stag was 'given best'.

When a stag does start running, he can keep on for 20 miles or more. Then a mysterious impulse that no one quite understands directs him to a stream. 'Going to water' is the resort of the beaten stag, the instinct that sometimes prompts him to leap off a cliff into the sea. More often, he takes his stand in a river. The hounds, swimming after him or barking on the bank, hold him at bay until a rider turns up with a gun, loaded with specially weighted pellets, and aims a heart shot: the strong, thick bone on the head is more resistant and can sometimes make a bullet bounce off. What is wanted is a clean kill, but there can be problems reaching a stag in water.

' 'E was under the 'orse like an 'ippo,' a spectator remarked of an incident some weeks earlier. Usually, guns are carried by half a dozen or so members of a hunt, some on horseback, some in Land-Rovers. The idea is that once a stag has reached the limit of his strength, someone should be at hand to dispatch him as quickly as possible, but the sheer unpredictability of hunting means that a copybook kill is far from certain. An eyewitness tells of a kill near Bratton Fleming, north Devon, at the end of October when a stag crossed a road, heading towards territory where hounds could not follow. Someone pulled a shot at him, hit him on the right side of the head, split his eye open and blew off a lot of fur and hair. The stag got up, carried on through a hedge and down towards a small stream. He was hit by another shot, and again he went down, then struggled on through the stream and up a slope to a line of trees, before turning to face the hounds. A third shot, to the heart, killed him and the hounds pulled back in fear as he fell forward into their midst.

Hounds are not expected to attack a live stag, although it can happen. It is as likely that a stag will go for a hound, goring it, or, as has been seen, run the length of a field with a hound on his antlers.

When the carcass is dragged from the river, it is usually broken up on the spot. For opponents of blood sports, the post-kill ritual is confirmation of a blood lust they suspect is near the surface in every hunting enthusiast: even for agnostics on the subject of hunting, it is a rough affront to an animal's dignity.

Rapidly, the huntsman slits the belly, drags out the entrails and throws them to the hounds as their reward. ('You have to de-gut the stag quickly or the venison is spoilt,' Mrs Harding explains.) Next, the heart is removed. ('The heart always goes to the person whose land the stag is killed on.') The liver is chopped up and handed round, warm and bloody, ('A lot of the people who follow like a piece of the liver.') The skin is rolled back from the feet, or 'slots', and they are cut off. ('The slots are very much prized. People give the huntsman a tip for them and have them mounted.') Finally, the big teeth, or tushes, are pulled out. ('People like to have these made up into brooches.') The antlers are the property of the hunt, mounted during the summer and given to favoured friends of the hunt or as prizes at agricultural shows.

The Devon and Somerset take about 150 deer a season, old stags in the autumn, hinds in midseason and young stags in the spring. (The season is a long one, lasting from August to April: including the other two hunts, the Tiverton and the Quantocks, the number of meets held in the West Country each week averages about seven.) A summer deer drive, when hounds chase deer into a line of guns, completes the culling process. As a result, the hunt claims, deer herds are healthy, their numbers are controlled. The hunt also claims that the deer in fact enjoy tacit protection because of the sport they give.

Even their best friends cannot deny that deer do a lot of damage to crops. They are wasteful eaters. They go into a field of roots - swedes or sugar beet-take great chunks out of the top leaves and the roots die. Farmers are the backbone of the hunts and tolerate these depredations only because they get a lot of fun out of hunting the deer. The prospect that red deer could be wiped out if hunting were banned is one the League Against Cruel Sports takes seriously, though it cannot accept that all farmers would be so vengeful - 'That's a slur on the farming community.'

Farmers, meanwhile, get very angry with the League, which has been campaigning against blood sports for nearly 60 years. The League is not a charity; it has 15,000 members, whose donations, contributions and legacies have enabled it to buy up tracts of land, mostly woods, in the West Country, where it bans all hunting and sues any hunt infringing the ban for trespass. It now has 32 such sanctuaries, controlling 2,000 acres, many unfenced. Farmers claim that deer safe in League woods create havoc in the fields around. The League responds by accusing some farmers of planting root crops deliberately right up to the trees so that deer can be enticed out and shot.

Plenty of illicit shooting goes on -Exmoor is said to be rattling with rifles - but deer experts believe a fragile balance is just about being maintained among the 900 or so red deer on the moor. Deer are regarded as a 'renewable resource', producing a venison harvest that is quite legitimate as long as it is not exceeded. If hunting were suddenly stopped, they believe, the removal of its restraining effect on farmers could push numbers down to danger level.

Rob Jarman, of the Somerset Trust for Nature Conservation, points out that, historically, a strong hunt has helped to control the poaching of red deer, 'When there's been no hunt on Exmoor, deer numbers have collapsed. From the conservation point of view, we are far more worried about poachers than the hunt. They are completely destructive, they'll go on the hill and shoot any deer they can find.'

A deer carcass can fetch up to £300 and three or four deer taken in a night can easily mean a £600-£700 profit, tax-free. Most of the venison ends up in Germany. It is not generally popular in Britain, and the market here has tightened now that the 1980 Deer Act requires dealers in venison to keep records of where the meat comes from. Although poachers can now be fined £1,000 and have their vehicles confiscated, this has not stopped the deployment of poachers' vans, fitted with deep-freeze units, all over red deer country. It has also made poachers more vicious towards those who try to apprehend them, as lan Pedler, who spends several days each week on anti-poaching patrols on behalf of the League, well knows. He reports the numbers of deer taken are 'staggering'.

Poachers use arc lights on LandRovers to mesmerise deer at night.

They are then shot or set upon by lurchers trained to go for the throat. Poachers have been known to stretch piano wire between trees and drive deer into it so that their necks, are broken, or set snares to strangle them or catch them by the feet. They use crossbows, silent and lethal, or shotguns with game-load cartridges suitable only for short-range shooting of game birds, that wound and maim.

The League Against Cruel Sports believes that, far from discouraging poaching, hunting encourages the poacher mentality: a poacher could argue that if some people are allowed to kill deer for fun, why shouldn't he kill them for money?

In its single-minded pursuit of a protectionist policy, the League has also tangled with conservationists.

The Somerset Trust was undeniably angry when the League used its superior purchasing power to snatch 60 acres of ancient woodland at Alfoxton and Holford Glen from under its nose last September with a clinching bid of £50,000. The wood, haunt of Wordsworth during his brief sojourn in the Quantocks, containing oaks and wych-elms more than 300 years old, has unbroken links with the cover that existed thousands of years ago, making it one of the top four ancient woodlands in the south-west. Because of their age, the trees support extremely rare lichens as well as sheltering vulnerable ferns and mosses. But the wood has been unfenced against deer and sheep for years, and now there is almost no natural regrowth. The Trust's first action would have been to fence the woods, with the intention of bringing on oak saplings as the old oaks fell down. Now it is obliged to rely on the League's goodwill.

Many West Country conservationists take a jaundiced view of the League's sanctuaries, where not only do red deer browse at will - they are by nature woodland rather than moorland animals - but disapproved-of plants run riot. 'You should take a look at some of the League's older bolt-holes,' one critic said. 'A wood they own on Exmoor is full of oak trees growing up through a tangle of rhododendrons. Rhododendrons take over a wood in no time. They cause such a lot of dense shade that you end up with nothing growing underneath.' lan Pedler's response to this line of argument is tart and to the point. The trouble with many conservationists is that they become concerned about animals only when they are on the point of extinction, and then they proceed to launch campaigns to save them. They forget that the main reason for all this cover in our woods is that animals live there! They are home for deer, foxes, badgers. We're quite prepared for any wood to be managed on condition that the animals who live in it are happy and that damage is not done to the animals' habitat.'

For its part, the League has had to come to terms with biology and recognise that if there are too many deer around, some will starve. In the absence these days of wolves to carry out nature's culling, it holds that expert marksmen should do the job, 'shooting with a rifle, using a downward trajectory from a specially constructed and concealed high tower'. This way the deer never knows what hit it and suffers no fear. The League argues that this is the most humane form of deer control, points out that it is practised elsewhere in Britain, and asks why the West Country and the New Forest, which has one deer hunt, should be the only places to persist in barbarism in the name of sport,

A sportsman experienced in the ways of the West Country and of staghunting agreed that shooting by expert marksmen was a solution, but said it was a mistake to get carried away about guns. Bungled shooting could be worse than hunting, which at least saw the animal dead. 'I've seen hunts turn away from the animal they are hunting to put a deer that might have been the victim of a pot shot days before out of its misery. I have seen a lower jaw shot away, a deer blinded, a stag running around on three legs, the most excruciating and horrible conditions caused by blundering shots.

'But stag-hunting is a means of recreation, and that is what people can't take. I don't much like it myself and respect the League's ethical stand. But on Exmoor the form of control has to be acceptable to the people who live there - and that form happens to be hunting. If it were stopped, the deer would be exploited very quickly, so I don't think we should look with too human an eye on a beast having to die from time to time for the sake of the species.'

It might be so. To be moved by the terror in the eyes of a hunted stag might be sentimental: to live its fear as it faces the hounds, anthropomorphic; but to imagine that one day people will not look back on stag-hunting with the abhorrence they now feel for bullbaiting or cockfighting is the sheerest delusion.

So, Melvyn, if hunting isn’t just entertainment why was an ice-cream van following the hunt?

By Emma Milne

TV vet Emma Milne – in the week when the Lords rejected a ban on hunting – went on a stag hunt for the first time. What she saw sickened and appalled her

In a way, it was the ice-cream van that was most bizarre. Deep in the beautiful countryside on the Devon-Somerset border, we had gathered to watch a hunt – the pursuit across fields and forest of a terrified stag, hounds and horses dogging its every step until the frightening end.

But everywhere we went, in whichever lane, meadow or copse the stag chose to seek refuge, the ice-cream van would appear.

I had expected many emotions to hit me on my first hunt: horror, revulsion and empathy for the beleaguered animal. I had expected to see the red-coated huntsmen as an appalling tribe I could regard as my enemy and on whom I could focus my hatred. What I had never expected was an ice-cream van – with a man in a white apron genially handing out lollies, cornets and 99s – adding an extraordinarily surreal element to the scene.

To those who have never been on a hunt, this may seem a strange observation. But while I can assure you that the sport is every bit as horrible, brutal and cruel as I always believed, what I didn’t realise until that day – and the reason the ice-cream van was so significant – is that for many who follow hunting, it is not a sport at all. It is entertainment.

In the week the Lords rejected a ban on hunting with dogs, I maintain my view that it is the most callous of public spectacles still allowed in this country. Now I can speak from the point of view of having been on a hunt, not from ignorance. If only some of the peers who spoke in favour of hunting had joined me, would their views have been the same?

In the run-up to the Lords debate the Countryside Alliance sprang into action, lining up a succession of tame peers to write articles and make speeches outlining their principled opposition to a ban. One, surprisingly, was Lord Waheed Alli, the millionaire creator of the Big Breakfast TV programme and a prominent fundraiser for Tony Blair. Another is the Labour peer Melvyn Bragg, more usually associated with his championing of the liberal arts.

The plan was chilling, callous and cynical

I, like most people in this country and perhaps like Lords Bragg and Alli, had never been on a hunt. But I felt I had to go and see first-hand whether hunting really was as cruel and violent as I imagined.

I had always understood it to be quite simple: the hounds would set off with a huntmaster to scour the fields and copses until they found a scent. Then, with the sound of a horn and a cry, the riders would charge off in pursuit until the prey was run to ground, held at bay by the dogs and then shot.

That prospect was bad enough, but it did not come close to the horror I saw amid the quintessential English countryside of the Barle Valley when the Devon and Somerset Staghounds met last week. Instead of a quick pursuit, a swift death or – hopefully – escape for the stag, the plan of attack was chilling, callous and cynical.

After a brief chase, the huntsmen give the order to lay off, allowing the terrified animal to recover some composure. This was, one supporter told me, to give the stag a ‘sporting chance’. It soon became clear that it was actually to give the hunters a full day’s gruesome entertainment.

When the huntmaster decided enough time had elapsed, the dogs were unleashed again to force the stag back into the open. As soon as it was spotted, the riders galloped across the fields and the followers – perched on the roofs of their Land Rovers or astride quad bikes – would head to the next vantage point.

This pattern was repeated throughout the day. Each rest period became shorter than the last. Only when the stag is too exhausted and terrified to flee is it cornered – usually by water.

Despite the public nature of the event, the participants and their followers form a peculiarly closed world. Although they were perfectly polite, many recognised me from television and their piercing, ice-cold stares made me realise that I was, to put it mildly, unwelcome.

Spectators driven by their blood lust

Some of the spectators, called ‘caps’, lined the roadsides, stopping motorists to ask for money to support the hunt. Why were they standing around in muddy fields all day? I can only imagine it was some kind of blood lust. Colourful as the gathering was, I’m sure they wouldn’t have given up a whole day to watch a bloodless drag hunt.

The uneasy quiet of another lull was broken when the stag was spotted and chased into thick woodland where, clearly distressed, it found temporary refuge. Soon the hounds were sent in again, their cries echoing along the steep, narrow hillside. Word came through that they had lost the stag and perhaps even some of the hounds, and we waited an hour, looking at the dense wood where the stag was thought to be hiding.

I felt a growing sense of fury. I could not believe how the horses were treated by many riders. I had spent 30 minutes watching an elderly woman spurring her horse and pulling at its mouth to make it prance on the spot. Others were being ridden at great speed along steep, rocky tracks. I was shocked how many riders used spurs and whips unsparingly.

At last, a group of riders and hounds was sent into the undergrowth to ‘draw out’ the beast. Suddenly the stag broke cover. I could see the exhausted animal silhouetted against the greying skies. The hunters were getting impatient to chase, but in a flash the stag was gone again.

At this moment the atmosphere suddenly changed. John Stone, the whipper-in, had recognised me and my guides, Peter White and Kevin Hill from the International Fund for Animal Welfare. He glared when he saw Pete filming him. ‘You’ll regret this, you will,’ he said, shoving past on his horse.

An undercurrent of violence became almost palpable as the prospect of a kill became more and more immediate. The demeanour of the hunters and followers was different now. Rarely had I felt so threatened. We were on a narrow public lane blocked by the hunt. Pete politely asked them to move.

Two women in tweeds and hairnets refused. ‘You never do,’ one replied tersely, before a call came to rush off in the opposite direction. Pete stood back, but the lady directed her horse straight at him, crushing him against the car. Pete was hurt and bruised.

Until this moment, the hunt had seemed almost quaint. Now there was no doubt the huntsmen were after blood. Their adrenaline was up and the stag was literally running for its life. I felt sick.

A heart-wrenching howl rang out

That’s when we heard the sound of the stag in distress. It was a heart-wrenching howl – something I had never heard before. Like the cry of the hounds, it reverberated around the valley. The hunters suddenly sat up, then charged into the woods.

It was only when I got home that I realised how upsetting the day had been. We live in a society that has banned badger baiting, cock fighting and dog fighting yet it is still perfectly legal to hunt stags.

Supporters claim deer is hunted to control a ‘pest’. Really? Can an animal you so rarely see in the countryside truly be a pest? Even if it were, why not simply shoot the beast rather than chase it for five hours until it is run into the ground, exhausted and terrified, before it is killed? I found it desperately sickening to see this mindless cruelty at close quarters.

As I turned to leave, the howling of the terrified beast ringing in my ears, the other spectators seemed pleased with their day’s entertainment.

Yards away, bloodthirsty hunters were determined to see a beautiful, noble animal destroyed. But at the ice-cream van, a queue was already forming.