10 years ago: THE HUNT - Documentary / Fox Hunters in the U.K. Want Protected Status Under Discrimination Law

Fox Hunters in the U.K. Want Protected Status Under Discrimination Law

 

A lobbying group is preparing a bid to define hunting with animals as a protected belief. Many experts have questions.

 

Amelia Nierenberg

By Amelia Nierenberg

Reporting from London

Aug. 26, 2024

Updated 9:23 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/world/europe/uk-fox-hunting-ban-status.html

 

English fox hunters have tried, for years, to push back against a nearly 20-year-old ban on their beloved sport.

 

The centuries-old tradition of using packs of dogs to chase and kill foxes — or any wild mammals — became illegal in England in 2005, after a long parliamentary struggle driven by campaigners and lawmakers who opposed it on animal welfare grounds.

 

So far, the law has stood, and fox hunting remains hugely unpopular among the general public: 80 percent of people in Britain think it should remain illegal, according to YouGov, a polling company.

 

Now, a pro-hunting activist has a new plan of attack.

 

Ed Swales, the activist, founded Hunting Kind, a lobby group that aims to protect hunting with dogs and other forms of hunting, in early 2022. He wants to use Britain’s Equality Act — which protects people from discrimination because of their age, race, sexuality or religion, among other things — to classify a pro-hunting stance as a protected belief.

 

That would put it in the same legal category as atheism, pacifism, ethical veganism, and, ironically, a moral opposition to fox hunting.

 

“If he’s ‘anti-hunt,’ well, you can be ‘hunt,’” Mr. Swales said. “It’s just the same law.”

 

Mr. Swales, 55, said he was preparing to bring a series of anti-discrimination lawsuits in the hope of setting a legal precedent that could, eventually, help reverse the fox-hunting ban.

 

“We’ve been doing this for millennia,” he said. Hunting is “literally part of our cultural heritage.”

 

Hunting itself is not illegal in England. Shooting deer, rabbits, duck and some other animals is allowed during hunting seasons, with permission from the landowner and a gun license.

 

But the hunting community is bracing for an anticipated challenge by Britain’s new Labour government, which pledged to ban trail hunting — where dogs follow a deliberately laid scent trail, usually of fox urine, instead of a real fox — in its election platform.

 

The British Hound Sports Association, which promotes and governs hunting with dogs in the U.K., says that by simulating traditional fox hunting, trail hunting allows the community to continue “to support the sport they love” despite the ban.

 

But animal rights activists say trail hunting can be a smoke screen for illegal fox hunting, because trails frequently run through land where foxes live, and foxhounds cannot always tell the difference between a fox and an artificial scent.

 

Last year, Chief Superintendent Matt Longman, England’s police lead on fox hunting, said that illegal hunting was “still common practice,” with trail hunts frequently taking place in natural fox habitats.

 

“Foxes often end up getting caught and killed by the dogs regardless,” said Josh Milburn, a lecturer in political philosophy at Loughborough University who studies animal rights.

 

Late last month, Mr. Swales sent out a survey to fellow hunters to try to find potential discrimination cases. He said many shared instances of verbal abuse or intimidation during recent hunting excursions. And this year, two venues canceled events for trail hunting groups after campaigns from anti-hunting activists. “They got told, ‘We are canceling you because we got so much pressure from the anti-hunt brigade,’” Mr. Swales said.

 

Some experts said that the planned discrimination lawsuits were a distraction from the debate over animal rights, which hunters with dogs have already lost in the court of public opinion. “In making this argument that fox hunters are the persecuted group, they’re trying, I think, to shift the conversation from talking about foxes to talking about people,” Dr. Milburn said.

 

Others questioned the idea that those who hunt with dogs — a community that has traditionally included some of Britain’s wealthiest landowners — needed special protection.

 

“Here we have an argument being made that in fact some of the most privileged in our society should also be protected on the basis of their shared activity chasing and killing a terrified wild animal,” Edie Bowles, the executive director of the Animal Law Foundation, a legal research charity, wrote in an email.

 

Several lawyers and academics who study discrimination said Mr. Swales’s argument might have some success, but the bar would be high. Under Britain’s 2010 Equality Act, a protected characteristic must “be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint” and it must “not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

 

“The test requires that the belief be genuinely held and that it be sufficiently cogent and weighty and coherent,” said Colm O’Cinneide, a professor of constitutional and human rights law at University College London. A mere political opinion would not pass muster, he said: “There needs to be some sort of belief structure or framework.”

 

Experts said that a protected belief could be easier to argue than trying to define hunters as a minority ethnic group — like Sikhs, Roma or Jews — which Mr. Swales has also proposed.

 

Speaking at a public event in late July, he claimed that his advisers had told him that “the qualifications of an ethnic group, there are five of them — we hit every one, straight in the bull’s-eye,” which he reiterated in interviews with The New York Times.

 

“The legal assessment is that we would qualify for both categories,” he said on Thursday.

 

But he has since backed off from the idea of starting with the minority group argument, saying his team would prepare protected belief arguments instead. “Pick the lowest hanging fruit first,” he said, paraphrasing his legal team.

 

Hunters have already tried, and failed, to argue that bans infringe upon their rights.

 

In 2007, a belief in fox hunting was explicitly denied protection in Scotland’s courts, where a judge found that “a person’s belief in his right to engage in an activity which he carries on for pleasure or recreation, however fervent or passionate,” did not compare to protected beliefs or religion, and therefore would not be covered under human rights law.

 

And in 2009, the European Court of Human Rights unanimously ruled that the ban on fox hunting with dogs did not violate human rights.

 

“If hunting can be shown to be more than a recreational activity, perhaps as part of a belief system in human supremacy over animals or human dominion over the earth, then a protected belief system could work,” Dr. John Adenitire, who teaches animal rights law at Queen Mary, University of London, wrote in an email.

 

For Mr. Swales, it is now or never.

 

His push comes after years of stewing about restrictions on hunting — without, he says, enough of a fight back from the hunting community.

 

“All we do is sit here and talk about it and drink sherry and bemoan and bewail our situation,” he said. “And nobody actually does anything.”

 

Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news More about Amelia Nierenberg