Harry B. Nielson, Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast on Christmas Day, chromolithograph print published in Vanity Fair, Christmas, 1897
The hunter characteristically admires, and even identifies with, his quarry, and that sense of identification commonly leads to the visualization in the hunter’s imagination of the animal object of the chase as a fellow sportsman, participating in the hunt with equal pleasure and enthusiasm and equal relish of tradition.
The fantasy of the quarry-sportsman gives rise to one of the most popular and best-loved genres of sporting art, images of La Chasse Renversé, the roles of hunters and hunted reversed. No foxhunter’s den is completely furnished without a humorous print like A.C. Havell’s Foxhunter’s Dream or the beloved Mr. Fox’s Hunt Breakfast (above).
The same comedic effect, and the same sportsman’s pleasure in thinking of his adversary in the field as fellow sportsman, can be found in shooting prints, like the very well-known contemporary print by Alexander Charles-Jones “Cocks Only,” which gleefully depicts a line of Ringnecked Pheasants in hunting vests, smoking cigars and drinking while peppering a discomfited group of incoming naked men.
Another classic example of the same humorous genre by Snaffles, published in Hoghunter’s Annual in the 1930s, depicts a couple of senior ranking boars smoking cigars and admiring trophy mounts of British officers acquired in the hunting field.
I had assumed, without any special investigation or thought on the matter, that this genre of sporting humor was specifically British and Victorian, but I was decidedly wrong.
What I have referred to as La Chasse Renversé is, at least, a common medieval artistic humorous subject, found in all sorts of forms and expressions, in paintings, sculpture, manuscript illuminations, and even tiles, representing a variation of all kinds of humorous reversals referred to in general as Le Monde Renversé. I feel sure, at this point, that a thorough search would produce similar examples of sporting facetiae from Classical Antiquity.
Some excellent examples of the hare turning the tables on the hunter were posted at Archivalia.
The Hunter’s Doom,” marginal illumination to The Romance of Alexander by Jehan de Grise and his atelier, 1338-44, Bodleiana Ms. 264, fol. 81v
Anatole France remarked sardonically that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges.” In Brooklyn, it forbids both evidently also to harvest fish or game in Brooklyn’s 585-acre Prospect Park.
A year ago, federal agents gassed 400 Canada geese resident in the park, which were considered to represent a hazard to planes using nearby La Guardia Airport. They had their reasons. In January of 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 ran into a flock of geese and would up crash landing in the Hudson River.
But can New York turn a blind eye as former Lehman and Bear Stearns executives now also resident in the park reduce the nuisance population of grey squirrels, pigeons, and geese or take panfish from the lake? Perish, forbid.
The New York Post reports that what my friend from Yale, Mr. Brewer, describes as “an awesome locavore experiment in living off the land” was rudely interrupted by “spoilsport cops.”
Cops have busted a group of oddball poachers in Prospect Park — a band of vagrants that was trapping and eating ducks, squirrels and pigeons.
Parks officers wrote four tickets — two for killing wildlife and two for illegal fishing — totaling $2,100 in fines during a two-day period last week. ...
“This is a dodgy group,” said park-goer Peter Colon, who spotted one of the men catching a pigeon while his friend started a fire. “They are the most threatening people in the park.”
The disheveled — and possibly homeless — tribe in question uses “makeshift” fishing poles and traps to catch the critters, then grills them over the fire, according to park watchdogs.
“One woman uses a net to bag the ducks,” said wildlife advocate Johanna Clearfield.
The kind of person you or I would call a busybody or general nuisance always gets promoted in the conventional journalistic parlance of our time to some form of “advocate” or “activist.”
Lots of luck collecting those fines, New York City. I bet the hobos used the tickets to light their evening cook fires.
William Herman Schmedtgen, Quail Shooting in Louisiana, 1897
A couple of generations ago, coveys of wild bobwhite quail could be found by hunters from Florida as far north as Southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Today, quail hunting exists only for pen-raised, released birds on pay-for-shooting preserves and plantations.
What happened to wild quail? Where did they all go?
The New York Times discusses the problem and advances a theory.
Quail hunting has been both aristocratic and egalitarian. It is a sport of Southern plantation gentry who ride walking horses with bespoke double guns in their scabbards and have pedigreed pointing dogs racing across the fields before them. It is also the sport of the farm kid armed with a dad’s old shotgun and a rangy mutt for a hunting companion. Both types of hunters have equally satisfying hunts, but these days social standing does not matter. Everyone is quail-poor. Bobwhite quail are one of the most studied wildlife species in the United States, yet conservationists have yet to halt the declining populations.
Biologists agree that overhunting is not the issue. Quail are prolific breeders but have a short lifespan. Hunting seasons could be eliminated and still approximately 90 percent of the quail would be dead within the year. Other predators, like raptors, coyotes or raccoons, are also not the reason for their decline, although many hunters point the finger at them.
Don McKenzie is in charge of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, a team of 25 state fish and wildlife agencies and conservation groups. The goal of the group, formed in 2002, is to get wild quail populations to what they were in 1980.
It is one of the most difficult large-scale wildlife restoration projects. Canada geese, whitetail deer and wild turkeys — all at one time low in numbers — have become so populous that they spill into the suburbs, but bringing back bobwhite populations is a struggling enterprise.
“One of the difficult parts of quail restoration is we have to restore suitable habitat at a landscape scale,” McKenzie said. “When you compare that with deer and turkey restoration, the habitat was already suitable. It was a matter of catching remaining wild animals in places where they were and moving them to places where they weren’t and protecting them until they took care of themselves. It’s still a challenge, but nothing compared to what we face now with bobwhites.”
The reason restoring bobwhite quail is so difficult is because it involves changing the nation’s manipulated rural landscape. According to McKenzie, exotic fescue, Bahia grass and Bermuda grass took hold across the United States in the 1940s. These carpetlike grasses were planted to promote better cattle grazing and edged out the native warm-season grasses that are conducive to good quail habitat. The native grasses grow in clumps, which allow the quail to hide, move and forage and are essential to their survival.
With pastures covered with invasive exotic grasses, the quail found cover along brushy fencerows and field edges, but by the 1970s modern agricultural practices that maximized every inch of soil devoured these small sanctuaries and left quail with few hideouts.
Wildlife biologists have known about this connection between warm-season grasses and quail habitat, and many landowners have tried to create an oasis for quail on their property by planting a paradise of native plants. Yet the quail population never reached the old numbers.
“Resident game bird conservation professionals have been telling landowners this for 50 years: all you need to do is some small-scale stuff on your place and you’ll have birds and everything will be fine,” McKenzie said. “Well, after 50 years of doing that, it certainly doesn’t work.”
The problem is that the islands of prime quail habitat — restored or naturally occurring — are not connected to one another to create larger plots of good habitat where quail have greater odds of survival.
“We have to come up with bigger pieces of landscape that are managed in common, and have connections with other pieces of well-managed landscape where there are sustainable populations of birds,” McKenzie said. “We must make it happen by the millions of acres instead of by the tens of acres.”
The problem is not restricted to bobwhite quail. The Times overlooks the fact that same thing has happened to the ringnecked pheasant in the Eastern United States.
Up to the 1960s, the Asiatic pheasant had been successfully naturalized for many decades, and wild pheasant populations existed from Maryland and Virginia all the way up to Southern New England.
As with the bobwhite quail, one finds today everywhere in the East, the wild pheasant population has been completely eliminated. The State of Pennsylvania stocks thousands of pen-raised pheasants annually, and it makes no difference. Within weeks, the birds are gone.
I think the Time’s authorities are correct that edge-to-edge farming, encouraged by the Department of Agriculture’s experts, had something to do with all of this, and the altered system of grasses theory has some plausibility, but I think there may be more to it than that. I don’t see how the complete protection of raptors cannot be playing a role. And, beyond that, experience shows that populations of wild birds and animals do change dramatically and unpredictably.
Back before WWII, Canada geese were becoming very scarce and some subspecies were even believed to be nearing extinction. The wood duck was rare, and had been removed from the bag list of huntable species. In those days, the prime hunting ducks were black ducks in the Northeast, and canvasbacks in the Chesapeake.
Today, Canada geese are a public nuisance. They’ve stopped migrating. Their population has exploded, and the once less common larger subspecies is a standard inhabitant of malls, office complexes, and parks. Wood ducks are now common and have the largest bag limit, and it is unusual to ever get a shot at a black duck or a canvasback.
I don’t think the experts have a good explanation for all the wildlife population changes which occur over time.
When the modern urbanista hunts, he won’t necessarily carry a rifle or a bow, but he’ll certainly come equipped with a great big shiny theory.
Outside describes a (to my mind rather inconclusive) effort by three marathoners to run down Pronghorn Antelope to test the theory that prehistoric humans used to get their groceries by brute persistence.
Through the binoculars I see them: nine tiny men in bright jerseys running in formation across the vast short-grass prairie of eastern New Mexico. They’re chasing a tawny pronghorn antelope through the crackling stalks of late summer’s fading wild sunflowers. The buck weighs about 130 pounds, like the men racing after it, but that’s about the only thing they have in common.
The pronghorn is the second-fastest animal on earth, while the men are merely elite marathon runners who are trying to verify a theory about human evolution. Some scientists believe that our ancestors evolved into endurance athletes in order to hunt quadrupeds by running them to exhaustion. If the theory holds up, the antelope I’m watching will eventually tire and the men will catch it. Then they’ll have to decide whether to kill it for food or let it go.
“I’ve harvested a ton of pronghorn,” bellows Peter Romero, a camo-clad, 260-pound New Mexican big-game guide who’s standing next to me, squinting into a spotting scope. “But never this way.” ...
Romero showed the runners where to find antelope-hunting permits—they paid $985 for a tag on Craigslist—and explained a few laws the men would have to obey. They’d be required to stay within the roughly five square miles of ranchland we’d received permission to use, and they could pursue only a male antelope with horns taller than its ears. Assuming they actually succeeded in chasing a buck to the point of exhaustion and still felt the resolve to kill it, a licensed hunter would dispatch the animal with a pistol shot. The use of a gun or bow is required, since New Mexico doesn’t allow human-hurled projectiles, sticks, or bare hands to be used as hunting weapons. ...
As ridiculous as this spectacle might appear, the men are testing a much-debated scientific notion about when and how humans became hunters. Between two and three million years ago, when our australopithecine ancestors ventured out of the forests and onto the protein-rich African savanna, they were prey more often than hunter. They gathered plant-based foods, just as their primate brethren did. Then something changed. They began running after game with long, steady strides. Evolutionary biologists like Harvard’s Dan Lieberman think the uniquely human capacity for endurance running is a distant remnant of prehistoric persistence hunting.
We can run all day, the theory goes, because there was once a caloric advantage to it. Our two human legs, packed as they are with long slow-twitch muscle fibers, make us better runners over long distances than most quadrupeds. And our three million sweat glands give us the ability to cool our bodies with perspiration. An antelope, by contrast, sprints—for up to 15 minutes—while wearing a fur coat and relies on respiration (panting) to release the heat that builds up with exertion. Add to the mix our ability to organize and strategize and, well, you can see how persistence hunting might actually work.
On today’s BBC radio’s Women’s Hour, in an 11:09 episode, correspondent Anna Kostalas encounters 9 female hunters taking the Quebec Hunting and Fishing Federation training course for hunting black bear.
The background commentary by Georges Dupras of the Animal Alliance of Canada is notable for its errors, intolerance, and authoritarianism. Dupras grudgingly concedes that hunting for material economic motives, for subsistence, is acceptable (big of him to give native hunters and back country survivalists his permission), but opposes passionately hunting for spiritual sustenance and aesthetic experience, hunting for sport. To a self-appointed “expert” like Dupras, sport hunting is simply taking pleasure in killing.
The 9 Québécoises ignore the prig Dupras, and enjoy and defend hunting.
Typical copper-jacketed 150 grain .308 lead bullets
The National Shooting Sports Foundation warns that Lisa Perez Jackson, Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, the same leftwing fashionista who misused her state environmental office to pander to the whims of liberal extremist groups by imposing a ban on bear hunting in New Jersey, is considering implementing a nationwide ban on all traditional lead ammunition in response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity.
Lead sinkers would be banned for fishing, too, by the way.
Here is their petition filed August 3, urging a nationwide ban on lead-based ammunition and fishing tackle.
The estimates of wildlife deaths caused by lead ingestion are the purest of fabrications, based entirely on supposititious estimates created with massaged figures drawn from artfully selected data. Who ever saw an animal eat a spent bullet?
Nonetheless, such a ban, implemented by the EPA (on the basis of legislation which explicitly exempted ammunition) would have a devastating impact on all the shooting sports, enormously raising ammunition costs while drastically impairing performance. The quantities of game animals wounded rather than killed would be enormous if such a ban became a reality.
The NSSF is strongly urging us to send in letters opposing the EPA action, but personally I think the fix is in, and writing Lisa Jackson is a waste of time. I suggest advising your congressman and senators of your strong opposition, and voting Republican in November.
Today… we are losing touch with too many of the places and proud traditions that have helped to make America special. Farms, ranches, forests, and other valuable natural resources are disappearing at an alarming rate. Families are spending less time together enjoying their natural surroundings. Despite our conservation efforts, too many of our fields are becoming fragmented, too many of our rivers and streams are becoming polluted, and we are losing our connection to the parks, wild places, and open spaces we grew up with and cherish. Children, especially, are spending less time outside running and playing, fishing and hunting, and connecting to the outdoors just down the street or outside of town. ...
it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Establishment.
(a) There is established the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative (Initiative), to be led by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and implemented in coordination with the agencies listed in section 2(b) of this memorandum. The Initiative may include the heads of other executive branch departments, agencies, and offices (agencies) as the President may, from time to time, designate.
(b) The goals of the Initiative shall be to:
(i) Reconnect Americans, especially children, to America’s rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and forests, great parks, and coasts and beaches by exploring a variety of efforts, including:
(A) promoting community-based recreation and conservation, including local parks, greenways, beaches, and waterways;
(B) advancing job and volunteer opportunities related to conservation and outdoor recreation; and
(C) supporting existing programs and projects that educate and engage Americans in our history, culture, and natural bounty.
(ii) Build upon State, local, private, and tribal priorities for the conservation of land, water, wildlife, historic, and cultural resources, creating corridors and connectivity across these outdoor spaces, and for enhancing neighborhood parks; and determine how the Federal Government can best advance those priorities through public private partnerships and locally supported conservation strategies.
(iii) Use science-based management practices to restore and protect our lands and waters for future generations.
Barack Obama thinks America’s children are not hunting and fishing enough? And there’s going to be a federal initiative to do various things about this?
Visions of federally-grant-funded programs hiring aging boffers to take a boy fishing swim before my eyes. I should get one of those How-To-Write-Federal-Grant-Proposals books and start a corporation, rather like ACORN, which would recruit the kinds of individuals my mother used to refer to uncomplimentarily as “woods rats,” the kind of guys who’d rather fish and hunt and drink than work, and sign them on board to take under-Field-Sports-privileged youths out bluegill fishing and bunny shooting. I know some of just the bars to look for my first staffers in.
The idea of a democrat administration ponying up to pay for the gasoline, live bait, cartridges, (and beer) required to expose America’s youth to the out-of-doors is wonderfully amusing.
It’s been blizzard after blizzard since mid-December. We’ve been covered in snow, and most of the hunting season in Northern Virginia was a write-off this year.
Yesterday, though, for the first time in months, we were finally able to go out. Happily, favorable weather coincided with a special occasion. Dr. Betsee Parker had invited the Ashland Bassets for a guest meet last Sunday at her historic Huntland Farm, a century ago the home of the renowned sportsman Joseph B. Thomas, Master of several illustrious packs, and author of Hounds and Hunting Through the Ages.
The opportunity to see Huntland was a particular treat, and the typical Sunday field accompanying the Warrenton-based basset pack was supplemented by an unusually large group of guests representing hunts from all over the region.
The architectural details are particularly delightful at Huntland. The shutters feature a fox’s head, and the shutter stops are cast in the form of a bunch of grapes. Joseph B. Thomas’s left gate panel (see above photo), greets the visitor with a “Salve,” and then quotes Virgil’s Georgic III, 42-45:
En age segnis
Rumpe moras; vocat ingenti
Clamore Cithaeron
Taygetique canes domitrixque
Epidaurus equorum
Et vox adsensu nemorum
Ingeminata remugit.
Lo, up! the horn calls
Break off delay! with ringing cries
Cithaeron summons,
Taygetus with his hounds
and Epidaurus trainer of steeds,
and from the applauding woods
the call echoes back redoubled.
Rabbits proved to be in short supply, but hounds and people were positively thrilled to be out of doors and hunting again. The well-populated field was keen, and everyone’s exertions were more than adequately rewarded by glimpses of the charms of Huntland’s magnificent architecture and broad acreage.
At the end of the day, Dr. Parker welcomed the entire company inside the great house, providing a post-hunting “tea,” which could have been more accurately described as a buffet banquet. Prior to the the current owner’s occupancy, this wonderful house had been neglected and sat empty and unused for many years, and it was a real pleasure for visitors to see the superb job of restoration and decorating which has again made Huntland into such a spectacular showplace.
Karen’s photo essay has yet to be edited and uploaded, but I will add a link to it as soon as it becomes available.
Huntland staff awaiting guests with stirrup cup in front of the grand house.
The BBC has a slideshow of Russian celebrities and ordinary Muscovites out on horseback near the town of Mozhaisk, reenacting an Imperial Russian Hunt in costumes intended to resemble descriptions in War and Peace.
In her memoir, Instead of a Letter, published in 1963, renowned editor Diana Athill, makes the case for the field sports brilliantly, but then, with little explanation, at the end, declares herself a firm Puritan opponent.
Any kind of hunting, whether with a gun or with hounds, brings the hunter into a close intimacy with the country over which he does it. He learns what kind of cover a partridge, for instance, will favour—learns it so intimately that he can almost feel himself crouching under the broad, wet leaves of a field of sugar beet. He knows what weather does to ‘his’ land, and to its animal inhabitants; he knows smells and textures, the sounds different sorts of fallen leaves make when he walks through them, the feel under his palm of the moss on the damp side of a tree trunk. Because of his pursuit his senses have to be more alert than those of even the most enthusiastic walker, so he takes more in. He has to contend with nature, not merely look at it, wading through heavy land, clambering through thorny hedges, allowing for wind, observing the light — and discovering, of course, as much as possible about the habits of the creatures he is after. People who have always been, as a matter of course, against blood sports often gibe at the sportsman’s professed affection for animals, but paradoxical though it may be, it is perfectly true that there is no surer way to identify with an animal than to hunt it. The man who shoots for pleasure only is doing, I myself now believe, something wantonly destructive—but I have no doubt that it is he who knows best what it is like to be a hare, a partridge, a pheasant, a pigeon. ...
Hunting had no pains—or rather, its pains were both private and shared, and sharpened its joys. That I was nervous almost to the point of throwing up at every meet, hearing the crack as my horse’s forelegs hit the top bar of a gate, the crunch as one of its hooves came down on my skull, was at the same time an internal matter and something in which I was not alone. During the waiting about before the field moves off, many people are likely to be either unusually silent or unnaturally hearty. The more frightened you were, the more miraculous the vanishing of fear as soon as things started to happen; the more exciting the thud of hooves, the creak of leather, the more triumphant your thrusts ahead by risking a blind bit of fence while others were queuing for a straightforward bit. What instinct it is in a horse that gives it its passion for following hounds I do not understand. It is not only the obvious herd instinct, for I have often known horses who continued to quiver and dance, to be alert in every nerve, when we had lost the field and were riding alone, stretching our ears for the hounds’ voices, and I once had a pony who was so mad about the sport that she would not eat when she got home after a long day but would lean against the door of her loose-box, straining to hear the intoxicating sounds from which I had had much trouble turning her away several hours before. Whatever it may be, it is shared by the rider, and it is not lust for blood. I used, whenever possible, to avoid being in at the kill, and of all the many people I have known who enjoyed hunting, not one took pleasure in the chase’s logical conclusion.
A long hack home after a hard day could be physical torture: cold, stiff, often wet, you could reach a stage when your mount’s every stride seemed a jolt, and every jolt drove your spine into the back of your head. That, and the nerves, were part of the game that made it more than a game, that extended you more than you thought you could be extended. At the Manor there would be a groom to take our ponies when we got in, but in Hertfordshire and at the Farm, where we looked after them ourselves, it went without saying that we rubbed them down, fed and watered them and put on their rugs before we plodded our own aching bodies up to their hot baths (oh, the agony of numb fingers coming alive in hot water) followed by tea-with-an-egg. Absurd though one may think the English gentry’s obsession with animals, a child gains something from their care. To be able to feel your own chills and fatigues in the body of another creature, to rub them away with a twist of straw and solace them with a bran-mash, is to identify with a being outside yourself.
My family’s way of talking about its animals—horses, dogs, and goats—would have sounded absurd to anyone who had no experience of them or liking for them. We saw them not as docile or bad-tempered, ill- or well-trained, but as personalities with attributes similar to those of humans. ‘Poor Cinders, he gets so bored in the lower shed,’ we might say of a pony; or of a dog, ‘Lola is in a very haughty mood.’ This anthropomorphic approach to animals, despised by those who do not share it, can be taken to foolish extremes but does not seem to me to be an error. I think Freya Stark put her finger on it when she described the death of a lizard she had once owned. She was grieved to a degree she thought exaggerated until it occurred to her that the distance between the lizard and herself was far less than the distance between her and God, and in that way she expressed a truth which urbanized people forget: that Homo sapiens is not a creature apart, but one development of animal life. The more subtly developed animals do share with human beings certain muscular movements and actions which express similar states of consciousness; in them these actions are released more directly, by simpler stimuli, but at bottom they are not different and we natter ourselves if we suppose too great a distance between our own behaviour and that of Pavlov’s salivating dog.
I have always taken great pleasure in the company of animals, or even in their neutral presence—a rabbit hopping across a lawn or a bird teasing at some berries in a tree—and I am glad that I was brought up in such a way that this pushing out of feelers into a part of nature other than my own is possible to me. I am also glad that circumstances enabled me to go one step further in this than most of the people among whom I was raised, and ask myself the question ‘If I feel like this about dogs and birds and horses—what about those poor foxes?’
It was hares and stags in my case, for ours was not a fox-hunting county and we had to make do with harriers and a pack of staghounds which hunted deer maintained for the purpose and captured alive after the day’s sport, to be returned to their paddock. It was sometimes argued that the older, more experienced deer knew that this was going to happen and fled from the hounds for the fun of the thing, but they did not look as though they thought it fun. I hunted in order to ride. The subtleties of working hounds meant little to me, and throughout my youth the pleasure I got from riding was so great that I averted my eyes and shut my mind to thoughts of the creatures the hounds pursued, but the images registered, all the same. I cannot be certain whether I would have acknowledged them if those months between school and Oxford had ‘gone on forever’ and my country pleasures had continued unbroken, but I believe I might have done. My father did: he did not merely give up shooting, but came to loathe it.
As it happened I was living in London, and no longer killing anything, by the time I acknowledged that to kill for amusement was barbaric. Now I detest blood sports. I would never hunt again, nor would I go out to watch anyone shoot, nor even, I think, catch a fish unless I were without food. Living creatures have to prey on each other in order to exist, but not one of them can annihilate another for its own amusement without committing an outrage.
Athill, I think illustrates here beautifully the contradictory mindset of the Trans-Atlantic leftwing intelligentsia.
Their devotion to sanctimony and the conformist ideology of their class buries their personal experience of life and truth as thoroughly as the ashes from Vesuvius buried Pompei. Athill has just argued that Homo sapiens is not a creature apart, and she has remarked noticing just how fond horses are of hunting; but, look out! here comes the Labour Party political correctness, we musn’t chase poor little foxes. Why, we must not even fish!
Intelligent as she is, Athill completely overlooks the fact that the chicken, steak, or sole, she had for dinner at some agreeable little boite was recently just as alive as the pheasant pulled down by a load of sixes at the end station of the drive at Sandringham. So too, she overlooks the fact that Charles James himself delights in hunting and makes his own living thereby. If we and other animals are not creatures apart, how is that friend Reynard can hunt innocently, or for that matter my cat, and not me?
Once the renowned editor has left the country house of her childhood behind and sits in judgment in the Metropolis, she seems to forget that no system of National Health or Old Age Pension scheme has been established for the fur, fin, and feather set. All flesh is grass, and the unshot pheasant does not escape misfortune to retire to a villa in Spain. Nature has in store a wide array of unpleasant ends for wild creatures, a great many of which are more considerably frightening, painful, and protracted than falling quickly in hot blood to gunshot or the chase.
Athill has acknowledged recognizing that the intimacy and understanding of the hunter for the game cannot be equaled elsewhere or otherwise achieved. Logically, she is obliged to make the connection between field sports and the preservation of the wild. Non-sportsmen will never understand wildlife properly, and without the emotional connection provided by sport, the human relationship to wild creatures will attenuate to indifference or sink to the cynical exploitation of anthropomorphized fantasies.
Rev. Thomas Crowder of St. Columba’s, Warrenton, VA, blessing the Ashland Bassets at their opening meet last October
Personally, I tend to find the survival here in Virginia of the traditional blessing of the hounds at the commencement of the season sufficiently quaint.
In England, one clergyman, at least, has updated the antique practice of blessing the agricultural tools on Plough Monday into the blessing of his parishioners electronic gadgets. I doubt it did anything to improve Vista though.
Reverend Canon David Parrott, of the St Lawrence Jewry Church in London, blesses his parishioners’ gadgets
Queen Victoria was celebrating her Diamond Jubilee, Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac was playing to packed houses in Paris, and the adventurersome (including Jack London) were heading to the Klondike in search of gold in 1897, the year in which Baily’s Monthly Magazine of Sports and Pastimes, founded in 1860, began issuing its annual Directory of Hunting, listing organized fox hunts in Britain. The listings were later extended to beagles, bassets, otter and mink hounds, and its coverage made world-wide.
Charles Moore reported recently, in the Telegraph that, despite Labour’s tyrannical hunt ban, Baily’s is not only continuing publication, but is this year, for the first time, available on-line by electronic subscription.
Since the 19th century, the facts of hunting have been compiled annually by Baily’s Hunting Directory. Like Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot in relation to the Baronetage, I find Baily’s my “occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one”. Between its red covers is contained a mass of information about almost every known and recognised pack of hounds in the world. According to the count for 2009, there are now 761 of them. You learn something new, interesting and satisfyingly obscure every time you read it. You also feel a thrill because of the adversity which hunting has so successfully resisted. As Lt Gen Barney White-Spunner says in his spirited introduction to the latest edition, the loss of liberty always “stirs something deep in the British soul”.
I mention the red covers, but in fact the cover turned black in recent editions, in mourning at the ban. This year, for the first time, Baily’s goes online . The publishers say that they still want to produce the book version as well – and I hope they succeed – but a web version undoubtedly offers certain advantages over a book. One is that new photographs can be posted at any time, so the site already carries first-class pictures of the current season. Another is that any subscriber (annual price £12) can contribute his own report of his hunt.
I have happily subscribed.
The print version costs £44.95/US$107 and may be ordered here.
The Inquirer posted a photograph of the wrong house. That home’s owner contacted me by email today asking me to remove the copy I posted of the photo.
Stung by criticism on the Internet of their July 27th raid on the kennels of Wendy Willard’s Murder Hollow Basset pack, the confiscation of eleven basset hounds, and PSPCA’s refusal for ten days to provide information on the hounds’ whereabouts or fate to concerned friends, the Animal Care and Control organization began yesterday to defend itself, first (yesterday afternoon, by some coincidence, not very long after my phone conversation with PR officer Gail Luciani) releasing a seemingly conciliatory statement suggesting that PSPCA was “working with the hounds’ owner” and even thanking (!) the Basset community.
Murder Hollow Basset Hound Update
In response to complaints, Pennsylvania SPCA officers visited the location of Murder Hollow Kennels and left requests to be contacted. There was no response to these requests.
On a follow-up visit by a Pennsylvania SPCA officer and representatives from the Pennsylvania Department of Dog Law six days later, the owner was present but refused entry. Both Dog Law representatives and Pennsylvania SPCA officers returned later that evening with warrants to enter the property.
The dogs were found to be in unsanitary conditions, and the number of dogs present exceeded the City of Philadelphia limit of 12 animals allowed on a property.
In lieu of charges, Pennsylvania SPCA agents worked with the owner to reduce the number of dogs on the premises and allowed her time to clean and make improvements to the area in which the dogs were housed.
The owner surrendered some of the dogs and is working to clean and improve the kennels prior to a follow-up inspection. The Pennsylvania SPCA is encouraged by her efforts in providing and maintaining a more sanitary setting as well as veterinary care for the dogs that remain.
The dogs are safe in foster care with an independent, partner organization.
We appreciate the outpouring of support for these dogs from the Bassett community.
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Murder Hollow hounds last year. They’ve never looked covered with feces, or riddled with parasites, any time I saw them.
Most of us did not know then that, slightly earlier, PSPCA had planted a much more colorful story with a sympathetic reporter at the Inquirer, which appeared yesterday morning.
Philadelphia resident Wendy Willard ran in tony rabbit and fox hunting circles. Her pack, formed in 1986, was listed among a select handful from Virginia hunt country and elsewhere in the prestigious Chronicle of the Horse, the bible of the horse and hound crowd. The kennel’s Bassets won awards at the Bryn Mawr Hound Show.
Last week the Pennsylvania SPCA raided her farmhouse in the Schuylkill Valley Nature Preserve and found 23 dogs covered in feces and riddled with parasites, said George Bengal, the PSPCA’s director of law enforcement.
“The kennel was a mess,” he said.
Humane agents first went to the house on July 21 in response to neighbor complaints about noise and odor, said Bengal. Finding no one home, they left cards asking the property owner to contact them. When no one responded, an agent and two state dog wardens returned on July 27. Willard refused them entry and as they left the property she threw stones at the officers’ vehicles, said Bengal.
They returned later that day with a search warrant and found dogs living in what Bengal described as unsanitary conditions and in need of veterinary care. Willard voluntarily surrendered 11 dogs and agreed to comply with certain conditions for keeping the rest, including inspections, he said.
“We could have charged her, but we didn’t yet,” said Bengal. “We could have seized the dogs, but she agreed to get medical care for the remaining dogs and spay or neuter eight of the 12 dogs” – the limit allowed under the city’s decades old animal ordinance.
Since there were fewer than 26 dogs on the property (the number required for a state kennel license) there were no citations issued by the state, said Chris Ryder, spokesman for the Department of Agriculture.
The dogs that were removed were placed with Basset hound rescue groups, the PSPCA said.
The PSPCA’s executive director Sue Cosby said they did not initially release any information about the incident because they thought they could resolve the issue amicably with the owner.
“The officer heading the case really went out of her way to work with the owner in an effort to have the kennels cleaned up and the dogs cared for rather than file charges and take all of the dogs,’” said Cosby in an email.
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So if you believe the PSPCA, this is one of those cases of a disturbed and arrogant society woman who belligerently defies law enforcement officers and throws rocks at them, while keeping a kennel full of neglected, filthy, and disease-ridden basset hounds, which hounds nevertheless, despite their pitiable condition, qualify for inclusion as a listed pack under the strict standards of the National Beagle Club, compete successfully at pack trials, and win prizes at the prestigious and highly competitive Bryn Mawr Hound Show.
Those of us familiar with basset packs have a couple of basic problems with the eccentric-woman-neglected-animals story line.
Although Wendy Willard as Master, is sole owner and supreme authority over the Murder Hollow Bassets, no basset pack operates single-handedly and in isolation. There is a staff, in this case of no less than ten Whippers-in: First Whipper-in: Lidie Peace. Hon. Whippers-in: Ginny Hofmann, Judy Hohmann, Pat West, Mary Bentley, Roy Feldman, Becky Forry, Philip Hofmann Sr., Trey Norris, Pat Renner.
The Murder Hollow pack has, listed publicly, all together, eleven active hunt staff members, all obviously drawn from the same “tony rabbit and fox hunting circles,” referred to ironically by the Inquirer.
Now while it is not difficult to believe that one single aging woman alone might possibly, because of circumstances of health, emotional stability, or even poverty, come to neglect so grievously a kennel full of dogs, in this case, we are expected to believe that 11 residents of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Philadelphia, all active and enthusiastic members of the horse and hound community, have all participated in a systematic pattern of animal neglect, failing to clean kennels, to deal with parasites, to monitor hounds’ health or to provide veterinary care.
These would be the same people who, as photos like this one show, don green woolen jackets and wear ironed white stock ties to run through the tick-infested woods at Aldie on warm days. Yet the lazy scoundrels cannot be bothered to clean their kennels. They will spend money on travel to pack trials in other states or on hunt uniforms, but won’t pay for vets. Sure.
Allegations about unsanitary kennels are pretty easy to come up with. Hounds do defecate. Nobody polices every pile of dog poop from the kennel floor the minute it arrives 24/7.
Riddled with parasites? What does that mean, I wonder. Did they see one hound scratching, and infer fleas?
Crediting the PSPCA’s good faith on allegations of this kind requires knowing a bit more about the role, character, and standard operations of that organization. I was confused myself yesterday about how it was that what I thought to be only a private humanitarian organization kept talking about violations, as if it were a branch of the government. I did not understand. They are.
I’m going to take a look at the PSPCA, who they are, what they do, and how they do business in another post. Soon.
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PBBurns, of Terrierman’s Daily Dose, took one look at NYM’s righthand column (Michelle Malkin, Charlton Heston, Islamaphobia, oh my!) and, naturally, decided I’m insane.
His observation that in blog coverage of stories one typically wants to compare a variety of news accounts is perfectly correct. However, in this case, I have a modest level of personal acquaintance with Wendy Willard and the Murder Hollow Bassets, as I’m member of the same “tony rabbit and fox hunting circles” myself. The incident came to my attention via reports circulated on hunting email lists, and repeated on the Border Collie board. The Inquirer story only appeared yesterday morning, and was not being found by Google the same day. I’ve done lots of Google searches. I’ve talked to people from basset circles who have tried to reclaim, visit, or obtain information about the confiscated hounds, and who are familiar with the detailed circumstances of the case. I also talked to the PSPCA people myself. Thank you for your advice, PB.
If I was not acquainted personally with basseting, or if I had first read that Inquirer story, I might not have thought very seriously about any of this myself, and simply shrugged and assumed that the PSPCA was telling the truth and acting properly myself.
Let me give you a tip on blogging, PB. One news story obviously supplied by one side to a pet reporter is not really a whole lot better than an informal account found in emails or bulletin boards. Evaluating either is likely require more than the testimony of a single source.
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