Sunday, 05 September 2010
Home arrow Why the ban is wrong
Why the ban is WRONG
We believe the ban is wrong for the following reasons:

  1. The ban on hunting is ambiguous, illogical and inconsistent. It is widely criticised by the legal profession and by the media as a bad law. It places an unnecessary additional burden on the judiciary and the police, and it alienates a significant minority of law-abiding British citizens.
  2. The ban on hunting was passed by Parliament despite the evidence of a Government commissioned, independent enquiry chaired by Lord Burns into the question of whether hunting caused unnecessary suffering to hunted animals. Lord Burns (a former permanent secretary to Gordon Brown at the Treasury, made a peer by the Labour Government; Crossbench) found no evidence that hunting caused any more suffering than any other form of population control. The ban on hunting with dogs is therefore discriminatory, unreasonable, and unjustified.
  3. The ban on hunting will not achieve the stated aim of improving the welfare of previously hunted animals. The evidence is already clear that more foxes are being killed rather than fewer after the ban, and that the ban on hunting is having an adverse effect on deer welfare in areas where numbers are now becoming unsustainable. The many hundreds of vets who opposed the law suggest that the ban is likely to cause more suffering rather than less.
  4. The ban on hunting is the product not of considered and responsible government, but of prejudice and the misuse of power. Some of those who voted for the ban have admitted publicly that they saw this as an issue primarily of ‘class retaliation’.
  5. The ban on hunting is one more nail in the coffin of country life. Among all the many other failures of the present government to safeguard the future of the countryside, the ban on hunting is the most visible demonstration of their ignorance and indifference.
  6. The ban on hunting has absorbed more than 700 hours of parliamentary time during the past 10 years. The great majority of British voters do not consider that hunting is an issue of national importance, and would condemn this as an outrageous misuse of parliament’s time and energy. The amount of parliamentary time devoted to the debate on the invasion of Iraq was 7 hours.