Tim Bonner

The latest of Rod Liddle’s diatribes will come as no surprise to anyone who recalls how he was sacked as editor of the Today programme after a gloriously chippy rant about our supporters in his Guardian column. But the distortion of opinion research needs to be exposed. Firstly he claims that ‘badgers are rarely cleanly shot’, which is untrue. But if he believes it, how does he justify his support for the hunting ban? The case for the ban was made (without any evidence whatsoever) that shooting foxes was preferable in terms of welfare than hunting them. If he is now persuaded that shooting medium-sized mammals is inherently cruel, will he join us in campaigning for the end of the ban on the humane use of hounds for fox management?

Today marks ten years of a ban on hunting a wild mammal with hounds in England and Wales, except under certain exemptions. To understand what a fundamentally bad law the Hunting Act is, and why it must be repealed, it is best to start at the beginning with the original purpose of the ban. For all the talk of animal welfare the long battle over hunting legislation was not predominantly about foxes or other mammal species it was about class, politics and a gratuitous misrepresentation of hunting and the people who do it. This is not my interpretation, but the reality as admitted by many of those who promoted the ban.