Labour to win? Surely not​…

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Howburn Digger H
Howburn Digger Jun 13, 2017 08:45:15
Replying to nigelswift

nigelswift wrote:
"So before this thread descends into a dead fox cub love in..."

Just to make my position clear, I'm well aware Nature is red in tooth and claw and that foxes enjoy killing. My simple view is that people shouldn't and that posing afterwards like a junior Trump is no longer acceptable.

Of course. I understand your position. Poultry farmers and sheep farmers have not got the luxury of such a position. But I totally respect yours. I know farmers who shoot foxes... but there isn't a single one that I know who would pose with the corpse for Facebook. The fox hunting ban was simply not what it appeared to be - right from the start. Here's an intriguing little snippet from Tony Blair from a couple of years back in the Telegraph (14.07.15).

In 2004 Tony Blair made a bet with Prince of Wales. The Prince thought Labour’s proposed ban on foxhunting was absurd, and said as much, so Blair wagered that people would still be hunting after he had left office. “But how, if you’re going to ban it?” asked the Prince. “I don’t know,” said Blair, “but I’ll find a way.” The Labour prime minister, by his own admission, was never ideologically opposed to hunting. But the ban was necessary to satisfy a key block of his MPs who had pushed tuition fees through Parliament. This quid pro quo swiftly became politically costly, however, and Blair became convinced he had made a mistake when a woman he met in Italy, who was mistress of a hunt near Oxford, explained how deeply intertwined the tradition was with Britain’s rural economy. “From that moment on,” he writes in his memoir, A Journey, “I became determined to slip out of this.” In the end, the law was “a masterly British compromise” which left hunting “banned and not quite banned at the same time”.

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Prince Charles compared the plight of the Beaufort Hunt etc to the plight of persecuted ethnic minorites such as Asians or Black People. The Prince of Wales back in 2002 had offered to leave Britain and simply ski for the rest of his life if hunting the fox on horseback with hounds was banned. This from The Scotsman (22.09.02).
It is understood the Prince, a passionate hunt supporter, told Blair that he "would not dare attack an ethnic minority in the way that supporters of fox hunting were being persecuted." In an outburst overheard by a senior politician, the Prince is also alleged to have said: "If Labour bans hunting I’ll leave Britain and spend the rest of my life skiing." The politician was left in no doubt that Charles was serious. "It certainly wasn’t said in jest - he gave the impression that he meant it," the politician said. The Prince’s comparison of the treatment of fox hunters to minorities such as black and Asian communities has caused uproar in senior government circles.

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Sometimes you catch sight of a newspaper headline and your heart simply soars like a hawk. After his promise to spend the rest of his life ski-ing....

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1988/mar/11/monarchy.fromthearchive

Bliar and his Labour decided not to make a body count of dead Iraqui civilians killed during the Bush and Blair illegal war in Iraq. But Blair DID publish the figures for the amount of foxes killed in England by Fox Hunts during the first week of the Iraqui bloodbath. American and British troops posed for photos with dead civilian bodies in Iraq and took trophies from human corpses. A bit like the fox-cub shooter. But worserer.

T tjj
tjj Jun 13, 2017 13:11:38
Replying to Howburn Digger

Interesting post HD, I didn't know that about Charles, suspect it was said some time ago and has the ring of princely privilege and petulance.

I'm very much against fox-hunting which only takes place in rural locations, simply because I've always considered it immoral to hunt a wild animal with dogs who then rip it to pieces. I accept they have to be humanely killed in certain circumstances to protect poultry and lambs. The fox is not the only animal who will kill a surplus of food - there is quite a long list. Whether it kills for fun is matter for debate. Domesticated cats do, as do ants and bottlenose dolphins, to mention just a few. And then there's humans of course. I came across an article in the that Unmentionable Rag Online written by a pest controller. He was writing exclusively about city foxes but says this about two 'types' of fox:

"The first is rural. He’s quiet, and shy, and lives by hunting rabbits and pheasants. In my line of work, killing them is tricky. They steer clear of cage traps because they are terrified of anything that smells of man. But that trait also makes them unlikely to attack humans.

The second is the town fox, a far more dangerous beast. He was born among men, grew up among them, and survives by stealing waste from rubbish bins or eating litter dropped in the streets.
You’ll often see him walking boldly around after dark, and if people are stupid enough to leave food out for him in their garden, he’ll happily take it.
To these professional scavengers, our modern towns and cities are like a banqueting table. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the urban fox — unheard of before the Sixties — has occurred alongside the never-ending explosion of the fast-food industry."

I would say the same applies to rats in towns - they get by very well on what we leave lying around. Generally though, however much we fear rats, most of us think they should be killed humanely.