Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 15

A thoroughly awful day out not because of the cruelty to animals, but because of the people you will have to mix with. Some of the worst kind of desperate betweeded social climbers queue up to join the Beaufort Hunt purely because there’s a chance – a tiny, weeny, itsy-bitsy chance that makes winning the National Lottery look like a dead cert – that Prince Charles will come along and kill something fluffy and squeaky. If it were Prince Philip who rocked up, there would definitely be something killed, even if it was one of the hounds that walked ‘a bit foreign’ or looked at him with slitty eyes or something.

You don’t even need to be part of the hunt to be part of it. You can, if you wish, follow it ‘on foot’ in a Range Rover at 90 miles per hour to watch the fox get torn limb from furry limb.

Some townies will tell you that the fox is frightened by the whole thing. Balderdash – anyone who has seen the hunt knows that the fox is smiling all the way through and enjoys the exercise. If it thinks it is getting away it occasionally stops to let the hounds catch up. In return for this sportsfoxlike approach, the hounds rip it to shreds in seconds, just as it would have wanted.

Hunting undoubtedly plays an important part in rural society. It is a place for like-minded aristocrats to meet and get married – especially if they are already like-parented. And it is a great social leveller – whether you are the high-born son of a duke or simply the brother of an earl, you will find huntsmen the most welcoming, gentle people who kill animals for pleasure you could ever hope to meet. And they won’t give two hoots if you went to Eton or Harrow, so long as it is one or the other.

But those country types, they won’t take any hunting ban lying down. ‘Because if hunting ever gets really banned,’ they point out, ‘what will we do with all the horses and dogs we use? We will have no option but to hack them apart with a bread knife in the middle of the street and send your daughter the photographs. After that we might poison all the lakes, just to make the point. It’s not our fault, it’s yours.’