The History of Opposition to Blood Sports in Twentieth Century England

Hunting at Bay

Michael Tichelar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138600102
• eBook ISBN: 9781315399768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

An interdisciplinary social history, this book examines the major pressures and influences that brought about the remarkable growth of opposition to hunting in twentieth century England. With public opinion consistently deciding from the middle of the century onward that hunting mammals for sport was cruel and unacceptable, it would appear that the controversy over hunting has all but been decided, though hunting yet remains 'at bay'.

Based on a range of cultural, social, literary and political sources drawn from a variety of academic disciplines, including history, sociology, geography, psychology and anthropology, The History of Opposition to Blood Sports in Twentieth Century England accounts for the change in our relationship with animals that occurred in the course of the twentieth century, shedding light on the manner in which this resulted in the growth in opposition to hunting and other blood sports.

With evidence comprising a mixture of primary and secondary historical sources, together with documentary films, opinion polls, Mass Observation records, political party archives, and the findings of sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and geographers, this book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and historians with an interest in human–animal relations.

Part I

The historical setting

1 Opposition to hunting

Chronology, debates and vitriol

Chronology

The history of opposition to blood sports in the twentieth century is a clear example of how public opinion can drive legislative change. The contrast between the beginning and end of the century could not be more marked. At the beginning of the century hunting had come to exercise a powerful influence in the creation of certain widely held beliefs. These cultural values were reflected across society in, for example, perceptions of gentlemanly behaviour, drinking habits and culture; interior design and décor; and movements like the Boy Scouts, where the virtues of hunting were extolled as adventurous, manly and patriotic.¹ These influences were obvious in popular art and literature, such as the work of Edwin Landseer and the novels of Rider Haggard, and especially in children’s books.² Hunting was also extolled as an elemental and possibly spiritual activity that brought men in particular, as well as some women, into closer contact with nature. Writers like Ford Madox Ford and philosophers like José Ortega y Gasset described the desire for the chase, including the kill, in primitive terms as something instinctive and deeper than just outdoor sport. Furthermore, hunting had enormous symbolic value as an ancestral tradition and was associated with an almost atavistic sense of what it meant to be English and part of an expanding world empire. It was generally accepted that hunting helped bridge the gulf between social classes in the countryside; cemented the relationship between the monarchy and people through a shared identity in a common pursuit; supported masculinity and morality; and, of particular importance at the time, provided excellent training for warfare and imperialism – a claim that was subsequently destroyed in the barbed-wire trenches of the First World War. Before 1914, any attempt to seek a general ban on any type of hunting, such as upper-class stag or fox hunting, or working-class rabbit or hare coursing, was therefore never a realistic political possibility. Abolitionists restricted their ambitions to specific types of hunting that might be regarded as ‘unsporting’, such as pursuing tame animals, where beaters forced the quarry to flee in the direction of the hunters, as in carted stag hunting. Even so, they remained an insignificant minority of humanitarians and intellectuals, and were regarded on the whole as ‘cranks’.

The main late nineteenth century pressure group that was opposed to hunting was the Humanitarian League (HL), set up in 1891 by Henry Salt, a retired Eton schoolmaster who gave up teaching to pursue a ‘simple life’ in rural Surrey. He coined the phrase ‘blood sports’ to describe hunting wild animals, while the supporters of hunting preferred the less contentious phrase ‘field sports’ or, latterly, ‘country sports’. The league recognised that fox hunting in particular was regarded as almost a national institution and that there was no chance of abolition. Rather, humanitarians like Salt and other like-minded intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw, concentrated their fire against so-called ‘cruel’ or ‘spurious’ sports, such as hunting tame stags and bagged rabbits and hares, as well as wider animal welfare issues, such as vivisection, which attracted stronger public support, especially from elements within the Church of England.

Aristocratic and royal interests dominated the leadership of organisations like the RSPCA, set up in 1824 to prevent cruelty to domesticated animals. This made the abolition of hunting wild animals, especially shooting and stag hunting, which were upper-class sports reserved exclusively for royalty and landowners, an impossible political objective. While some individuals in the emerging Labour movement, like Keir Hardie and the poet Edward Carpenter, supported humanitarian causes, working-class interest was focused on opposing the hated game laws and the misuse of agricultural land for non-productive purposes, such as sport. Rabbit and hare coursing and the right to poach game were jealously defended, especially by many rural workers and miners who lived in or close to the countryside. The question of animal cruelty as applied to hunting did not feature to any significant extent in popular culture or political campaigns. The issue was confined to small, middle-class pressure groups, like the Humanitarian League, with hardly any wider public appeal (although this is not easy to measure accurately in an era before opinion polls).

However, by the 1970s, opposition to field or blood sports had begun to attract much more public support. The colonisation of the countryside by middle-class, urban in-migrants escaping from crowded cities after about 1970 started to undermine traditional rural values and pastimes and the powerful elites that had dominated rural society up to that time. The exposure of the cruelty involved in factory farming and the use of pesticides, which first attracted public attention in the 1960s, reduced popular support for farmers, who had traditionally provided the personnel and resources to run packs of hounds. Anti-hunt sentiment became part of a more popular discourse concerned not only with the welfare of animals but also with animal rights informed by scientific and philosophical developments. The RSPCA, for example, became ‘a prime target for the new radicals aiming to transform its plodding respectability’.³ The prospect of the abolition of all ‘blood sports’ became a political reality for the first time, although it took another thirty years before this was realised in legislative terms with the election of a Labour government in 1997. The hunting traditions of the royal family received particular condemnation at a time when mainstream politicians, led by Lord Houghton of Sowerby and Eric Heffer MP, were making a concerted effort to put ‘animals into politics’.⁴ The growth of public interest in wildlife conservation, environmentalism and animal rights, underpinned by scientific and philosophical developments, was stimulated by authors such as Brigid Brophy (in her groundbreaking article about animal rights for the Sunday Times in 1965), Rachel Carson (in Silent Spring), Ruth Harrison (in Animal Machines), Richard Ryder (in Speciesism) and Peter Singer (in Animal Liberation). These publications added a new intellectual dimension to the campaigns to end all animal cruelty, including hunting.⁵

The 1960s also witnessed the emergence of more radical elements that were determined to take direct action, such as the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), set up in 1964, whose ideology was based on an agenda designed to transform ‘animal welfare’ into ‘animal rights’, although the extent to which the behaviour of the ‘sabs’ changed public opinion is open to debate.

As a result of all of these pressures, the RSPCA declared in 1976 that its official policy incorporated opposition to fox hunting and the shooting of birds for sport.⁶ This was the first time that the society had publicly opposed fox hunting, which was by far the most popular of all blood sports. It represented a major change of direction for the organisation and a long-term victory for anti-blood sports campaigners. The HSA hailed the move as a ‘major step forward’ and a ‘blow to the men in pink’.⁷ After 150 years, the opponents of bloods sports had finally succeeded in persuading the RSPCA to extend its remit to cover wild as well as domesticated animals, and to seek the abolition of fox hunting, so long regarded by its supporters as a national sport that had appeal across all social classes. A Labour government in 1997 translated this change in public sentiment into legislative reality through the Hunting Act of 2004. This was passed after much controversy and extended debate, and despite the reservations of several government ministers. Ultimately, MPs had to invoke the rarely used Parliament Act to overturn the constitutional opposition of the House of Lords.

By the end of the twentieth century the debate on hunting was part of a more general concern about the welfare and rights of animals. The controversy demonstrated above all else the way definitions of animal welfare and rights had changed over the course of a hundred years. At the beginning of the century the debate was dominated by an animal welfare model epitomised by the policies of the RSPCA, which campaigned to protect domesticated animals from cruelty in the home, on the street, in the laboratory and on the farm. This did not extend to concerns about the welfare of wild animals, which continued to be chased for sport by the society’s aristocratic leaders. Opposition to hunting was a minority cause within the wider animal protection movement, which tended to focus on the evils of vivisection and other welfare issues that were not directly concerned with blood sports. By the end of the century, the welfare model had been challenged by the cause of animal rights, although it was not completely superseded. The championing of animal rights is now a worldwide phenomenon. Its philosophy was popularised in the 1960s and went on to influence a number of public debates on factory farming, animal experimentation and the ethical treatment of the animal kingdom in general as well as blood sports. An ethic of care proved to be more influential than a philosophical belief in animal rights, influenced by an emerging body of feminist thought and activism.

Debates

Historians of modern Britain have not taken a great deal of interest in these questions. There has been only a limited amount of historical analysis of changing public ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The historical setting
• Part II From 1900 to 1970
• Part III The 1970s and thereafter
• Bibliography
• Index