Short answers to easy questions

My first reaction: “Of course, I think what the British are doing with this fox-hunting thing is totally un-American.”

My second reaction: “You know, there might be a good reason for that…”

My third reaction: “Oh screw it. Yay foxes! Boo hunters!”

Since 70% of the population of the UK is in favour of a ban on fox-hunting, the Left must be bigger than I thought.

I don’t know if the opposition to foxhunting reduces entirely to class resentment…

If it helps, it’s worth remembering that:

(i) A sentimental dislike of cruelty to animals is notoriously a part of the English national character.

(ii) Fox hunting involves furry creatures being torn apart by dogs.

Nope, Mill was on our side as well; “The reasons for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves–the animals”.

What d’you think about badger-baiting and dog-fighting, Mrs T? Ought to be legalised?

“Next week, I may tackle the question of why the Beslan siege appalled us more than the ongoing deaths of children through malnutrition and disease in Africa”

If you think the logic of emphasising Beslan over African malnutrition and disease is questionable, the same applies to emphasising fox-hunting over battery farming.

Opposition to fox-hunting is racist, actually.

Even in the US, where game hunting appears to have continuing popular support, don’t most US jurisdictions ban cock-fighting? It seems to me that (many? most? some?) people perceive a continuum of moral acceptability that decreases as one moves from killing animals for food and killing them for show, and it does not seem inherently unreasonable to decide that fox-hunting falls closer to the lower end.

Hounds, not dogs. Also, ad arguendum (accusative case), not ad arguendo (ablative case). At least someone corrected the misattribution of the Macaulay quote.

Gore didn’t win OK in 2000. You may be thinking of Dem Gov. Brad Henry, who opposed the ban.

While we’re on the subject of British oddities, could someone (logically) explain the meaning of this?

Stretches of the British countryside were opened to the public for the first time in centuries yesterday. Thousands of ramblers took to the hills in celebration of their right to roam.
The long-awaited legislation – first proposed 120 years ago and defeated 10 times since – came into force in parts of north-west and south-east England. Other areas will follow.
Showers greeted walkers as they set off for the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire yesterday morning. A spokesman for the Ramblers’ Association said the mood was nonetheless very cheerful, with local people joined by representatives of the Countryside Agency, the Country Land and Business Association and Moorland Association on the inaugural hike across previously forbidden territory.

bena: thanks ever so much. I dimly remembered that there was a factoid connecting Oklahoma, cockfighting and the Democrats, but clearly completely cocked it up.

Yuval: What’s to explain? The moors are now open to ramblers. It’s a great victory.

Fox-hunting itself is, by British historical standards, a relatively young pursuit. Its emergence as a fashionable activity came at the same time as the land enclosures of the mid-18th century; the two are not disconnected. The privatisation of public or common land, combined with the provision of nice obstacles, made the chase worth having — as a spectacular demonstration of who now owned the land. All very 1700s Whig.

A 250-year-old bourgeois tradition in Britain ain’t that special, in my opinion.

(It should be said, in the same breath, that the [‘Save Our’] hedgerows of Britain mostly date from the same period, and were the nice obstacles referred to above.)

A quick read of ‘Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight’ also shows that fox-hunting was considered among the most unchivalric of activities in medieval England. And with good reason.

Yuval: the ‘right to roam’ legislation opened up access to privately-owned ‘open country’ and common land for walkers (in British terminology, ‘ramblers’). Read more here.

Well, I have talked with a few English folks up and down the pecking order and I am convinced:

Wow, what staggering research. We salute you.

R.A. Lafferty, one of the greatest and strangest of science fiction writers, and an Oklahoman, described in Okla Hannali a foxhunt conducted by the Cherokees prior to their removal to the erstwhile Indian Territory via the Trail of Tears.

Having observed the immigrants’ fox hunt, they understood that the point was to have the dogs chase the fox, with humans following on horses. In their society, however, foxes were pets and dogs were raised as food, so they had to have boys dragging the fattened dogs to simulate a pursuit of the fox, which ran around for a while but eventually quit to curl up in the shade of a tree. The riders had a great time chasing around the countryside and beating up on each other.

Macauley’s take on this was actually (and wrongly) that puritans were opposed to anything not religious that gave people pleasure, therefore their opposition to bear baiting derived from false principles.

Johnson’s view was actually rather more sympatico: “It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.”

would it be possible to train the hounds not to kill the fox?

most dogs don’t know what to do if they actually catch up when chasing a cat. Or is the pack instinct to strong?

I know it’s not a realistic alternative, with the enforcement and control issues that would come up, I just wonder if it is possible.

There already is an alternative — it’s called drag-hunting in which the hounds follow a sent laid in advance by people dragging scented stuff behind them.

The only thing missing is the actual slaying of the fox at the end. However, the slaying part if quite important to these people…

““Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.”
Your opinion. Fine. Then don’t hunt. But don’t impose your opinion as a moral law. Violates Categorical Imperative, don’ty’know?”

cf:””Because slavery is inhumane.” Your opinion. Fine. Then don’t own slaves. But don’t impose your opinion as a moral law.” Animal rights is one of the few areas where I think the law should be moralistic, for the very obvious reason that animals can’t stand up for themselves.

I’m as appalled about animal cruelty as most non-PETA people, but like Otto (aka Sherlock) I thought the point of this post was to make an interesting analogy between fox hunting and much larger scale animal cruelty vs. Beslan and vastly larger numbers of children dying from starvation or disease. I think there’s something wrong with our moral sensibilities–most people seem to be more outraged by the murder of hundreds of children by obviously nasty villains than they are by a millions of children who die from boringly preventable causes. Evidently the most important thing is the presence of a suitably fiendish villain–the children’s deaths function as props, sort of like those innocent people that get killed at the beginning of a Hollywood revenge drama, providing the hero with the excuse he needs to spend the rest of the movie building up a large body count with karate chops, automatic weaponry, and exploding vehicles. Nobody makes movies about kids dying of diarrhea which inspires people to join NGO’s and bring clean drinking water to poor villages. Or lobbying to change trade rules to benefit poor countries.

But the thread turns out to be about foxes, so I’ll weigh in here–foxhunting seems kinda barbaric to me. But we ought to spend more time thinking about factory farms.

Perhaps the dogs should be registered in Ms. Marples Manners School so that their brutish tendencies could be unlearned.

Daniel asks:

What d’you think about badger-baiting and dog-fighting, Mrs T? Ought to be legalised?

That’s a good question. My answer is here, as is a question for you.

I don’t agree Daniel, and the bit about university education was a cheap shot of the kind I’d normally expect a conservative to make. (Lefties should make up their own cheap shots, not steal them.) Moral intuitions provide data, but they often tell us as much about the prejudices of the person holding them than about morality.

Beslan is worse in the obvious sense that some people deliberately murdered children, instead of merely allowing them to starve out of apathy, and if that’s all you mean, no argument, but I think the focus on the villain rather than the victim is what’s wrong here. If it’s a bad thing when children die, then surely we should pay more attention to the millions of deaths we could prevent than to hundreds killed by terrorists. Not that we should ignore Belsan or say that it shouldn’t have been on the front pages, but why, if compassion for human life is what drives us, do we do so little about the starvation deaths? It doesn’t seem to be the tragedy of an avoidable death that moves people, but whether or not there’s a villain handy.
Most people (left and right) are more interested in atrocities (especially the ones committed by our favorite villains, which are also “clearly” more evil than the ones committed by the side we might support). I think that this is motivated less by compassion than by the desire to hate evil villains.

As for hunting vs. factory farming, the cruelty of the farms seems far greater to me, even apart from the sheer scale involved, unless I’ve been misinformed about what goes on in the farms.

Lewis Grizzard once commented something along these lines: I think you should be able to hunt anything you want, provided you eat what you kill. And you can’t kill a second deer until you finish eating the first one.

So how do the English serve fox? In a pie? Or roasted, with boiled peas and mash?