THE COUNTRY sports lovers went to town today in droves as upwards of 70,000 of them gathered in London's Hyde Park to preach to a supposedly misinformed urban majority, hostile to fox-hunting, that there is lots to be said for it.

Indeed, there is - though much of it is emotively over-exaggerated.

For, alarmed by spectre of Labour MP MIke Foster's private member's Bill to outlaw hunting with hounds, the field sports lobby has grasped every economic, environmental, sentimental and liberal argument it can in order to defend the pastime.

So we are told that thousands of rural jobs will go, conservation will suffer, hundreds of hounds will be destroyed, horses will end up as meat on continental tables and, anyway, the rest of us have no right to interfere with their liberty.

But if those of us in East Lancashire look at our own rural economy and environment in, for example, the Ribble Valley where seldom a huntsman's cry or a foxhound's yelp is heard, we see agriculture, the environment and the country community all doing very nicely though it is already bereft of all the benefits the hunting lobby claim the countryside would lose if their sport was banned.

In short, it seems to us that it would not matter that much if it was - except to them because they would be deprived of a peculiar thrill that the vast majority of people find uncivilised.

Yet if that prospect is so awful to them and all the horses they profess to love would have to be slaughtered just because they could no longer chase foxes on them, all the tail-wagging hounds would end up as fertiliser, thousands of farriers, saddlers, grooms would be thrown on the dole and so forth, why do they pretend that it all depends on a fox being hounded and torn to bits at the end of the day?

They could keep their horses, jump over hedges on them; they could still go racing after the hounds; they could still keep the blacksmiths and grooms in work if they adopted blood-free drag hunting instead.

And there would not be any of the unseemly business of hunts invading private property or people's pets or innocent livestock being savaged by hounds either if they did.

Doesn't their reluctance to give up the warped, uncivilised pleasure of killing for fun say it all - and suggest that all the arguments being spouted in Hyde Park today are but disingenuous blather similar to that probably spouted years back to defend bear baiting, cock fighting and bull baiting?

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