BBC: Pro-hunt protesters storm House of Commons

[LibLabUK]

Parliament was suspended after five protesters burst into the Commons chamber while MPs debated whether to ban hunting with dogs. Four of the men ran out from behind the speaker's chair. Another wrestled past a doorkeeper from a different entrance. They were chased by officials but one harangued minister Alun Michael.

It came as thousands of pro-hunters continue to protest outside Parliament. There have been some scuffles but it has been a mostly peaceful rally.


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[Southsideirish]

1. Hooray, anti-hunt protesters - give em hell!

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. No, those are pro-hunt protestors (n/t)

[el_gato]

3. I don't believe in killing predators

If you're not gonna eat it you shouldn't kill it.

[flvegan]

5. I don't believe in killing anything

If your body doesn't need it, your shouldn't eat it.

I do understand that certain folks do need to hunt to eat, though, of course.

[PeaceProgProsp]

14. Even if you have no problem with hunting, hunting with dogs is

pretty gruesome. The dogs tear the fox to pieces.

In the UK, people LOVE animals. Half the shows on TV sometimes are about animals.

In a national community where the standard of decency is such that you wouldn't think twice about throwing a person in jail for neglecting to take a horse's bridle off so that the bridle caused the horse scabs and scars, it makes no sense that that same community would allow hunting with dogs.

[jdj]

40. This is where it gets weird.

This is why I don't have any warm fuzzy feelings about the re-introduction of wolves into national parks and public land. They don't exactly practice humane euthanasia.

Not to mention the various and sundry methods of torture and torment that people have devised for wolves over the centuries (the lucky ones just get shot outright by ranchers, with no suffering).

They sing pretty, but I don't think the whole concept is a wise idea.

[LibLabUK]

6. Whilst I don't agree with the countryside alliance et al..

"If you're not gonna eat it you shouldn't kill it."

Foxes are a pest, even in the city, and they do kill chickens and lambs. The rather nasty thing is they don't just kill what they want to eat they kill everything and then bugger off.

So the fox population has to be kept down.

One way to do this is to hunt on horseback with packs of dogs, the others being trap, shoot or gas.

I'm not keen on any type of hunting, but I think Parliamentary time would be better spent discussing more pressing human needs and bigger environmental policy issues.


All that being said, the demonstrators today gave up their right to be heard when they became violent (which they did outside).

[T_i_B]

8. And I agree with you LibLabUk

The fox is not an endangered species, it is a farmyard pest and if upper-class twits can have a bit of fun whilst culling them then so be it. Like it or not foxes have to be culled.

The fact that the prostest was violent does worry me. I went to 6 anti-war demos from September 2002 to April/May 2003 and none of them were violent, even the one which did involve civiol disobedience (some people staged a sit-down protest in front of an army barracks and promptly got arrested for it). The police were superb at all the demonstrations I attended. That this one should be so different is worrying.

[LibLabUK]

9. Yeah..

"The police were superb at all the demonstrations I attended."

I honestly don't think the police were at fault yesterday. From the very beginning of the march the protesters were throwing objects at them (spent shotgun cartridges mostly). They were actually very restrained in the way that they dealt with them.

"That this one should be so different is worrying."

The protesters turned up with the intention of being confrontational and were openly hostile in both their actions and word (I thought inciting people to break the law was an offence in itself?). There was no similarity to the friendly atmosphere that surrounded most of the anti-war protests.

Channel 4 News last night did a pretty good job of covering the activites of the protesters, their go-slow on the M1 and M25 is sure to have turned many people away from their cause. Infact one motorist was so incensed at having been prevented from picking up his young daughter from a school activity because of the tailback caused by the horseboxes he attacked one of the protesters.

The weirdest thing I saw on the reports last night was a middle-aged woman shrieking (it can only be described as shrieking, the sound was awful) at the camera "This will mean fucking civil war"..

[BuddhaGirl]

13. the foxes should be put down more humanely

no animal deserves to be tortured by "upper class twits" having "a bit of fun."

Fox hunting is anachronistic institution and has no place in modern society, just like royalty imho.

[T_i_B]

47. Actually

They may well be culled quicker and more humanely then if they were shot! Shooting an animal does not guarantee a quick kill, the animal may well be merely be left crippled, to die much more slowly.

Mind you, it's not like foxes show much compassion when they are in the farmer's chicken coup is it?

[BuddhaGirl]

50. not at all the same thing

"Mind you, it's not like foxes show much compassion when they are in the farmer's chicken coup is it?"

Rather ridiculous to compare what an animal does instinctually versus stupid human behavior.

[PeaceProgProsp]

If fox are pests, I bet I can find you a way to get rid of them

at 10 quid a fox, and which then allows all this land to get put to a better use.

If this is the reason you want to have a hunt, you've picked the mose inefficient way to do that, and you've picked a way that encourages rural economies which are maintining inequitalble distributions of wealth.

[PeaceProgProsp]

17. ...

double post.

[hyphenate]

12. True to some extent

Foxes can be pests, that's true--but making a "sport" of killing them is disgusting. Animal management is the more humane way of treating the overpopulation problem, but because some people consider hunting as a sport (NOT confined the UK or the U.S.), they will continue to hunt in the most barbaric fashions.

In California, for example, I worked very hard on several initiatives which passed--one was to protect the mountain lions and another was to ban steel leghold traps.

In the first, mountain lions are relatively shy creatures, and will show up only when WE invade THEIR territory--developers are building farther into the mountain lion range, so naturally, mountain lion sightings are getting more common. In addition, the hunters will send a pack of dogs out to "tree" the mountain lion and the hunter will come along leisurely and shoot the animal point-blank in the tree. How "sporting" is that? It's dispicable.

In the second, trappers were using leghold traps out in the wild, and were catching all manners of animals, including skunks, gophers, badgers, squirrels, and other "trash" animals. They weren't checking their traps for days at a time, and animals would often bite off their legs to escape. Sometimes the trappers would forget where their traps were, and animals would literally starve to death after being caught in the traps. Another aspect was that trappers positioned a lot of their traps at the edge of streams and rivers, just underwater enough to hide them. Kids, household pets and others were often caught in them as a result. The ban went through, thankfully.

"Hunting" on the "grand" scale that the UK has for foxes is hardly a "sport"--it's a method to torture an animal and give a bunch of supposed grown-ups a "thrill" to see a small animal in a dire situation. And most of the lower classes in England want to see it stop from what I know (I used to get newsletters from Lynx), since it's mostly the "Lords" (including the "prince never to be king") who enjoy it so much. It's almost as bad as the concept of canned hunts.

England is very forward thinking in a lot of areas of animal welfare. They've managed to help get rid of the fur trapping industry there, which I often hope will happen here, but I know people and some women are too vain to ever give up wearing fur coats. One woman I used to know had several furs, but after listening to me going on about how the animals are tortured and killed, and she began to think twice about wearing those coats in public.

[PeaceProgProsp]

16. There are much more humane ways to kill them. Furthermore

this is a land use issue.

One of the big problems in the UK is that a lot of land is used for the benefit for a very few wealthy people, and the problem extends much farther than just hunting.

Middle class wealth in economies throughout history and around the world have at their root a equitable distribution of land in a way where the land is used by middle class people in the most productive ways possible.

In the UK, large areas of land do not circulate through the marketplace down to middle class people and then are not put to the best, most socially productive uses possible. This happens for a couple reasons. However, one of the reasons is that rich people get this one tiny use of the land -- which creates no value for society, and which benefits people only a tiny bit -- and that is the hunt.

If there were no hunt, owners of rural land would then probably be encouraged to sell the land down to people who would put it to better, more socially valuable uses.

[jdj]

41. studies seem to show that animals who are under population

stress from hunting and other threats reproduce more and at smaller intervals than animals who are not.

[sleipnir]

4. Are all the security guards on Bank Holiday over there???

This is the second major "incident" this week involving lax security in major government offices/locations.

Though, it's great to see freedom of speech practiced, even if I disagree with their message.

Really, Britain might want to invest in some decent security guards, as overstated as this statement is anymore it's still quite true... "what if they had been terrorists?"

[LibLabUK]

7. Well...

It looks as if it might be an inside job as they got into the HoC from behind the Speaker's Chair which is not accessible from the public parts of the PoW.

[T_i_B]

46. Good question

We've just had an undercover reporter from The Sun bringing in "bomb making equipment" to Westminster too. I'm guessing a few Brits are asking the same question.

[arikara]

10. Very puzzling behaviour

Can there really be between 8,000 and 20,000 people willing to protest against a ban on fox hunting? Is there that many people in Britain that enjoy chasing around on horses after small animals, and who would join with a protest like this? I thought the ones who hunted foxes were the wealthy ones that can afford the fine horses, hounds and fancy duds.

I saw a news clip and there was a lot of scuffling with the police, and the police were whacking people with their clubs. Is hunting foxes so important to the "upper class" that CEO's, investment bankers and lords are out on the streets taking on the cops?

OMG!!!

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. According to the hunts' own figures

# 273 hunts have a total of 28,300 subscribers, including members (100 per hunt).

# 205 hunts have a total of 39,000 supporters club members (190 per hunt).

http://www.huntinginquiry.gov.uk/evidence/produce2.htm

Also:
Fox hunts have killed 13,987 foxes last season
and
200 hunts collect 366,000 head of fallen stock per annum

which seems to show they function mainly as a method of disposal for farm animals that can't be sold as meat.

[Briar]

15. And how many of the foxes killed

were caught in towns or other parts of the country and released just before the hunt, or bred specially?

[arikara]

30. thanks for the link

I had no idea that fox hunting was such big business.

I've heard of non-lethal hunts where they hire an athletic young guy to pretend to be the fox and they set the dogs after him. I had thought that it was a very civilized solution.

[PeaceProgProsp]

19. This is the equivalent of the CIA stirring anti-Allende sentiment.

It's a well-funded propaganda-fueled, uninformed political movement, I bet.

Like I said at the top, when the hunts go, a lot of land could potentially pass down to the masses, which will in turn create more middle class wealth, which will have a democratizing, liberalizing effect. I think the Murdoch-crowd are worried about that.

That's my hunch.

[Briar]

20. Like the Fuel Protestors

(also mainly supported by farmers) and Fathers for Justice (reflexively demonising women), this is an essentially reactionary movement whose main usefulness is to prop up Bliar. It unites the Labour Party behind him and so serves to counteract the divisive effects of Iraq and neoliberal economics on the membership.

[PeaceProgProsp]

22. Hello?

These movements don't prop up Blair. Blair is on the other side of these issues. And these movements pre-date Iraq.

These movements are all about preventing Blair's project of creating middle class wealth. And they use seemingly working and middle class people to create the false impression that these policies are hurting the middle and working class.

It's classic CIA-style oligopoly-protecting astroturf.

These people would rather see Blair gone.

[muriel_volestrangler]

26. I think Briar means that their main effect is to prop up Blair

inside Labour. He alienated a lot of the traditional Labour vote with his support of Bush in Iraq; now, with an election looming, by getting the bill through Parliament, he'll win back a bit of support inside the party, persuading them that he does still support longstanding party policies.

The pro-hunt protestors do genuinely want to keep hunting; and plenty of them are genuinely working class rural people (think of the working men, especially rural, who want to keep all their rights to hunt (ie shoot) in the USA). But the effect of their protests, especially when they turn violent, will be to shore up Blair's support inside his party, and maybe in the larger population too.

[skypilot]

18. I had no idea that the English felt this strongly...

...about hunting. The protest that I saw on the BBC News was very large and ugly. I couldn't help but look at it and think: This has got to be about something more than just hunting.

[PeaceProgProsp]

21. Yes, I believe it is about something else.

I think it's about how land will be used and who will benefit from it.

I think that the hunt is the last way that rich people hold onto large areas of land, and it's a way that land is used in a very unprofitable way, and a way that does nothing to help create a middle class.

If not for the hunts, I think a lot of land that is held in rural areas would be sold, and it would be people in the middle class and people trying to get into the middle class who would buy it for homes (which would build up equity) or for small farms (which would create competition for agribusinesses) or for other small business uses which would create wealth and enjoyment for middle class people -- and I can't really think of any examples, but maybe they'd range from splat ball, to go cart racing, to amusement parks, to who knows what. But they'd definitely be ways where more wealth would be created in the middle class.

[skypilot]

23. In a nutshell....

...it sounds, from your post, as though the rich, landowning folks don't want to be put in the position of rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi. The same old story.

[PeaceProgProsp]

24. It's more than rubbing elbows.

It's that they don't want to sell their land off in a way that would break down the hegemony of the wealthy and create wealth for people at the bottom and in the middle.

The crazy thing is that some of the propaganda they use is based on the claim that hunt provides jobs for poor people in communities that would otherwise be poor and have no jobs.

But the truth is, one of the reasons the only jobs in these communities are low-paying hunt-related jobs is because the hunt is the only game in town.

All these people would be better off if all that land was used in more productive ways and if there were other jobs, and if they owned their own land.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. Hunts don't own the land they hunt on

so there won't be any land redistribution if hunting is banned. The hunts get permission from the farmers to hunt on the farmland (a few farmers refuse it, but that may not go down well socially in the community). Since foxes are pests to farmers, most are happy for the hunt to go ahead.

The hunts are very traditional, class-based organisations. A few jobs do depend on them (but not as many as the pro-hunt lobby claim - they pretend that farriers would go out of business, when I think the vast majority of riders would keep their horses with or without the hunt).

But I think the main reason that many rural people want to keep them, is their innate conservativeness. They want things to stay as they are - and resent change forced on them by the majority who live in towns and cities.

Once the hunting struggle dies down, the same people will be protesting about wind generators in the countryside.

[PeaceProgProsp]

42. But don't they have stables and large clubs, the size of country clubs

They may hop fences and go on the farmer's land, but they start from a pretty big parcel of land owned by the hunt club, right?

[muriel_volestrangler]

45. Not normally

Most do own (or rent) kennels where the hounds are kept.

http://www.huntinginquiry.gov.uk/evidence/produce2.htm#p11

From a surveyed 285 out of a total of 302 hunts in England and Wales, only 61 owned 'coverts' (which I think means land they hunt on) - a total of 6,464 acres. Another 1,439 acres is owned as paddocks. There's about 25 million acres of agricultural land in England and Wales (http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/commondata/103608/f3_ag_land_dt_591950.txt).

About half of the hunts own horses - an average of 6 per hunt. Most people own their own horses, and have their own stables, or use commercial ones, the same as any non-hunting horse rider.

About half of hunts do own houses or flats; I think these are typically accommodation for the hunt employees who look after the dogs.

[LivingInTheBubble]

28. Some of the english only.

It must be a tiny fraction of the population who actually "hunt".

The protests were tiny (but more violent) compared to the massive anti war protests.

[T_i_B]

49. A week before I first marched against the Iraq war

...back in September 2002, The Countryside Alliance marched in London. They attracted 400,000 protesters (a similar amount to the number we attracted a week later), they got far more publicity then the anti-war march a week later, and yes, back then they were peaceful.

And when I attended an anti-war protest in Parliament square on halloween 2002 we attracted a similar number of protestors to the CA this week, although the countryside alliance mob were mobilised at short notice.

If anything, they may have benefitted the anti-war movement as they may have shown some people that yes, it's OK to protest and demonstrate peacefully and as a result made it easier for the anti-war crowd to recruit.

The difference between then and now would appear to be the violence. Not acceptable however you look at it.

[airstrip1]

31. Conservative rural England is in crisis

In the past ten years agricultural communities have been hit by BSE, foot and mouth disease and some poor harvests. To make matters worse the flow of government subsidies that used to prop up farming has begun to dry up. New Labour, which draws most of its support from the urban population, is not sympathetic. They point out that the Tory voting rural communities were quite happy to see miners and steel workers thrown on the scrap heap when their industries were deemed to be 'unviable'. Now many in government think it is time for the farmers to face the same economic medicine. It is this animosity between rural and urban England that underlies the bitterness of the conflict around hunting. Although Britain was the first country to experience the Industrial Revolution the levers of political power for over two hundred years remained in the hand of people with very close ties to the landed elite. The Conservative party represented their interests and was seen as the 'natural party of government'. This cozy relationship broke down with the arrival of New Labour. Blair sold out the old socialist left and decided the party had to become the servants of the all powerful international capitalist system. Without the backing of the corporations the prospects of the Tory party getting back into power are increasingly remote. They simply can not muster enough votes amongst the populace of the big English cities to turn out the Labour government. Their plight is not helped by the fact that the growing immigrant population in the UK are very reluctant to vote Conservative. Even amongst the large Muslim community, who might be expected to be hostile to Blair, a majority will probably still support Labour at the next General Election. Rural England now finds itself out in the cold. The resort to mass demonstrations and mob violence is a sign of its desperation. It would appear that since they can no longer manipulate the political system to get their way then they are going to resort to violence. I think that you can expect more trouble in the years ahead.

[rman]

43. mission accomplished;

goes to show how a small minority can create the impression that "the people" have a particular opinion.
Similar to how it was made to look like the people wanted the Florida recount stopped.
Just make a lot of noise. Electronic amplification (the media) helps.

[T_i_B]

48. Yes

It's not an important issue, but it is undoubtedly a hot button issue. Personally I can think of more pressing issues than fox hunting for Labour MP's to deal with but that's what they seem more interested in.

[JFreitas]

27. Hunting is a visible aspect of class warfare

George Monbiot, a bloke we should all be ocasionally reading, who writes chronicles for The Guardian, has just posted a text on his site (www.monbiot.com) where he basically states: If we want a classless society we must ban the hunt. Go read it, he makes many of the points made here in the forum, and pretty much sums up why the Labour MPs are (justly, in my opinion) backing proposal for banning the hunt.

He also makes the good point that compared with modern methods of animal breeding, banning fox hunting on the basis of cruelty towards animals should rank as a real low reason.

Best

[muriel_volestrangler]

29. Monbiot himself admits

that banning private schools would make more of a difference. Given that only 10% of England's population is rural, I'd go further and say that posh balls do more to keep class divides going in England. Or opera, or sailing a boat bigger than a dinghy. But no-one is trying to ban them.

The only justification for banning is the cruelty to animals aspect - and anyone who thinks they're really striking an effective blow for class equality by banning hunting is fooling themselves.

[janx]

32. Is this really about hunting in general (with dogs), or is it actually

about the fox hunt?

My guess would be the latter.

[muriel_volestrangler]

33. It's about hunting using dogs

which doesn't mean using dogs to flush birds, or to retrieve; it means using them to chase and kill the animals. Fox hunting is the major hunt done in this way, but hares, deer and minx (which aren't actually native to Britain, and are pests killing native wildlife that many naturalists would gladly see wiped out here) are sometimes hunted this way as well.

[LibLabUK]

34. Hmm..

Will they ban ferreting (using ferrets to kill rabbits in their warrens) too do you think?

Minks are vicious, I couldn't help but laugh when the ALF freed a couple thousand into the countryside from a fur farm. They decimated the local wildlife (birds, mammals including pets, amphibians) before most of them ended up dead on the side of the road.

[janx]

35. How low and disgusting! Naturalists probably would not want

to see the problem dealt with in that way, surely--?

What are rabbits and deer going to do to England, anyway--eat some flowers? I'm not against hunting if the hunters eat what they kill, but this sounds very twisted.

Are you saying (understandably) that deer, rabbits, and mink are all not native to Britain?

Populations change--ours, everybody's. And how do they whet the dogs' appetites?

Very strange.

[LibLabUK]

36. Hmm..

"What are rabbits and deer going to do to England, anyway--eat some flowers?"

Well deer destroy newly planted trees, and in some parts of the country are a problem because of a huge population increase.

And rabbits are vermin, Australia had to introduce myxomatosis to control their exploding population.

Mink aren't native, and if you've ever encoutered them you'll know what ravenous, vicious little things they are. They're only present in the wild in this country because animal rights activists freed them from fur farms. They decimate local fauna like nothing else.

[muriel_volestrangler]

38. No, I worded it badly

it's just the mink (which I misnamed 'minx' as well - not a great post) which is held as an invasive pest - eg Mink face cull to save Ratty from wipe-out.

Although the rabbit (not hunted with dogs, but hunted with ferrets, which are used to flush them out of their barrows, as LibLabUK pointed out above), and brown hare were probably also introduced to Britain (by the Romans); and hares are regarded as pests by some farmers (and I believe they will continue to be allowed to shoot them). Deer can be shot in season, and since they have no predators left in Britain, if they aren't then they will end up overbreeding and dying of starvation.

[Nevernose]

37. This was a big issue in Texas until the 1970's

There had been periodic attempts to ban hunting with dogs in Texas, and the issue finally came to a head in the 60's and 70's. Of course, the issue then was also not about sport hunting, but subsistance hunting with dogs. Not so very long ago.

The infamous Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson, the guy who single-handedly got the CIA into Afghanistan in the 1980's (Reagan had nothing to do with it, he just took the credit after the fact), was first elected on this issue.

[Paladin]

39. "The Unspeakable In Pursuit Of The Inedible"

Oscar Wilde's description of fox hunting, from more than a century ago......

[saigon68]

44. And they got even with poor old Oscar too

A tragic time indeed