NOW BAN CATS.
It is fascinating to learn from credible research at Reading University that domestic cats are estimated to kill 92 million small birds and mammals each year in Britain, killing up to 10,000 prey animals per sq km in urban areas, and significantly affecting the viability of some bird species. A typical urban cat kills around five prey animals every single day!
I keep whippets, and nowadays to take them rabbiting is actually against the law! Although I was impressed that my eight year old boy totally couldn’t understand how the government could ban hunting with dogs. “What? he said, but they are dogs! They enjoy hunting! that is what dogs do.” In my entire life my dogs have killed less animals than every cat kills each week, every week.
The defence of hunting is that nothing brings you closer to understanding an animal and how it thinks and exists in its habitat than hunting it. This comes over brilliantly in Siegfried Sassoon’s fantastic novel “The Memoirs of a Fox Hunting man”. Hunting puts human beings back into the animal world, in all it blood, snot and guts and the hormonal thrill of sensual experience - you have to immerse yourself in the the immediacy of how the quarry inhabits its own space. To catch a fox you have to learn to think like a fox.
The dislike of some people (mainly urban dwellers) for hunting is a symptom of an alienation from the visceral, sensual reality of the natural world; opponents of hunting live in a world where meat comes shrink wrapped; animals are sentimentalised and pets are treated like children. In truth, the alienation of human life to be decontextualised from the reality of animal husbandry and rearing animals for slaughter is a feature of modern industrialised society, and probably specific to capitalism.
Overcoming that alienation and putting women and men back into the natural world, overcoming the gap between town and country; and the distinction between manual and mental labour should in fact be part of the socialist project of creating a more sustainable, ecological and human-scaled society.
I have always thought it was shocking hypocrisy that so many townies oppose hunting, that kills a tiny number of animals; and usually kills them clean and quick; and yet they happily eat chickens that have spent their entire short life in pain and torment, crammed together in the dark so closely that the dead birds don’t even fall, bewildered, diseased, crippled and wading in their own shit.
The ban on hunting with dogs was really very little to do with animal welfare, and much more to do with imposing social conformity. Opponents of blood sports don’t understand hunting, and don’t understand rural life. There is no equivalent campaign to ban factory farming simply because people want the cheap meat and don’t really care about cruelty to animals if there is any personal cost; but banning hunting allowed people to feel morally superior to other folks whose lives are different. What opponents of hunting object to is not the fate of the hunted animals, but the fact that hunters enjoy it. (Actually, there is also quite a bit of opposition specifically to fox hunting in rural areas, because the hunts are often bad neighbours, who spook other people’s livestock, leave gates open, and are typically snobby; but this opposition doesn’t extend to other forms of hunting.)
Now it turns out that urban cat owners are unleashing a circus of carnage onto the wildlife population, on a far more massive scale than the rural hunting community ever even dreamed of! Remember, most domestic cats are deliberately introduced into the urban habitat by the conscious activity of pet owners.
If the banning of hunting with dogs was really about animal welfare, then these people who opposed hunting will now stop keeping cats? Campaigners will call for cats to be banned?
No, I don’t think so. Because the opposition to hunting was nothing to do with animals, and all about fear of people with different values, and all about enforcing social conformity of urban sentimentality onto country dwellers.
In Australia this relly is a big issue, as native species are under threat.
More of a dog person myself!
Comment by green socialist — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:09 am
Thank you Andy!
I have never understood why some socialists are so fanatically anti-hunting. I know some people trot out the ‘they’re all toffs’ argument but even the most fleeting experience of the reality disproves that.
I fear that something weird happened to socialism in the 1960s: the progressive and overdue opening up to previously marginalised social elements (ethnic, sexual and other minorities - and of course women) somehow metamorphosised into a detatchment from the hard realities of class; a politics of fantasy and wish-fulfilment, in which ‘animal rights’ seemed part of the new liberation.
I remember in the late 1970s being shocked by some comrades who thought that this liberation should even extend to embracing paedophilia. When you abandon class politics in favour of utopianism, you can end up embracing all kinds of nonsense, including anthropomorphism and the values of Disney.
Comment by Gail — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:34 am
Erm, well as a former teenage hunt sabber(oh, those were the days….and now with the changes in counter terrorism law I would now be considered an ‘extremist’….)I still find hunting cruel…and yes, a soppy soft town dweller who doesn’t understand, nor wants to understand the ‘hormonal sense of the thrill’….
Andy, there’s a big difference between moggies and humans. And how humans and moggies behave…. I have kept cats over the years, and me as a vegetarian of 27 years, it didn’t bother me in the least when they dragged in some half eaten prey, as cats are….predators rather like dogs…
But on the issue of say, fox hunting, I do take exception. Harrying a scared animal into a corner so they can be ripped apart by a pack of dogs. If that’s sport then you can keep it, it that’s about an adrenalin rush coupled with a massive thrill…then you can keep it…!!
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:44 am
I don’t really agree with this post politically but there has got to be something progressive about banning cats.
Comment by johng — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:47 am
Oh, and btw cute cat pic!
Just to say that my politics are class based and I am a socialist feminist. I don’t believe that opposing cruel ’sport’ like fox hunting is in fact utopianism.
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:48 am
I look forward to Andy Newman heading a campaign to bring back the much maligned working class sports of cock fighting and bear baiting, outlawed by namby-pamby liberals and do-gooders of past ages.
And while you’re at it, Andy, you can come out here to southern Africa, and tell the governments to abandon all this anti-poaching nonsense. Everyone knows that hunting is in our genes, and now we’ve got modern guns and aircraft we can blast anything that moves from the air, like that nice lady in Alaska used to do.
Some people were critical of that great revolutionary Nicolau Ceuacescu when he visited Mozambique in the mid-1980s, and demanded to take potshots at a few elephants. But no doubt you agree that every working class hero is entitled to have an elephant or rhinoceros head on their wall! It’s just a shame that all the large mammals in Britain were exterminated by our ancestors, who adopted exactly the same attitude to wild life as you do, so we are limited to slaughtering rather less interesting creatures such as foxes.
Comment by paul fauvet — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:49 am
How about banning red herrings instead of cats? Those who led the campaign against hunting, contrary to your misleading claims, also campaign against factory farming and other forms of animal cruelty. Your justification for such cruelty, as a particular ‘rural’ form of life that townies don’t understand (never mind that many of those participating in the thrilling slaughter of animals are townies and city dwellers), is precisely the kind of sentimental crap that you are supposedly militating against. You can justify practically any form of barbaric behaviour by a) comparing it to something worse and b) explaining that it results from a discrete, hermetically sealed cultural formation that ‘outsiders’ fail to understand. It’s not even ‘relativism’, it is just extraordinary bad faith.
Incidentally, while I generally don’t object to anthropocentrism, that doesn’t license complacency - the cruelty that we tolerate with respect to animals is not unrelated to how we treat fellow human beings.
Comment by lenin — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:55 am
I agree that there is a certain hypocracy in peoples opposition to hunting, or real fur for that matter, while being happy to eat factory farmed meat.
However, for me the problem with hunting is not the kill its self, or even primarly the crulety but the fact of humans seaking pleasure in killing.
As for the “its rural life” bollocks, I come from the Cornwall and I can report that the vast majority of people it the country, just like those in the towns, have never taken part in hunting. Not nessisarly ‘cus they are against it just because it has no connection with their lives.
Comment by Joseph Kisolo — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:00 am
Indeed lenin really sums up my position on the issue of hunting. And there were many townies who did indulge in hunting, from my experience hunt sabbing.
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:04 am
To catch a fox you have to learn to think like a fox.
Think like a fox? “I’m getting away I’m getting away oh shit they’re on to me out of breath nowhere to go oh shit I’m going to get killed I’m going to get killed…” Tally-ho!
opponents of hunting live in a world where meat comes shrink wrapped; animals are sentimentalised and pets are treated like children
This is a ridiculous generalisation. More to the point, you’ve got completely the wrong target. Almost all of us live in a world where almost everything comes shrink-wrapped (literally or metaphorically), and undoing that alienation from the bodily reality of work & exploitation is a huge task for the Left. But you don’t get a head start on it by supporting hunting.
What opponents of hunting object to is not the fate of the hunted animals, but the fact that hunters enjoy it.
Yes, exactly. It’s a barbaric pleasure.
(Actually, there is also quite a bit of opposition specifically to fox hunting in rural areas, because the hunts are often bad neighbours, who spook other people’s livestock, leave gates open, and are typically snobby; but this opposition doesn’t extend to other forms of hunting.)
…more specifically, a barbaric pleasure indulged in by arrogant gits who think they own the country.
If the banning of hunting with dogs was really about animal welfare, then these people who opposed hunting will now stop keeping cats? Campaigners will call for cats to be banned?
Actually there’s more consistency here than you think. PETA in the US have campaigned very successfully to stop cat-owners letting their cats out, for just this reason. I’ve got American friends who think it’s perfectly normal to keep a cat and never let it out of the house, which strikes me as animal cruelty in its own right. Personally I’m quite happy to be inconsistent with regard to this one, because I think it’s in the nature of cats to enjoy hunting. Human nature is much more malleable, as witness the fact that we live in towns, wear clothes, use the Internet, vote etc.
Comment by Phil — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:10 am
It seems that many of you do in fact agree then that banning hunting is not about animal welfare, but about social engineering.
From Louise and lenin’s arguments it seems that you think hunting should be banned becuase you personaally disapprove of it. Great arguments!
I am at a loss to understand how hunting a rabbit with a whippet is a barbaric cruelty that must be illegal; while hunting a rabbit with a ferret and a net is completely acceptable. Rearing a rabbit in a tiny hutch its whole life and breaking its neck yourself is not cruel; hunting a wild rabbit that has spent its life free and in the open air, and whose neck is broken cleaner and faster by a dog than a human could do it is cruel.
The problem comes from your moral misjudgement that hunting is “cruel”. You have broadened the definition of cruelty” so wide as to be meaningless. You also make a false assumptions about what hunting is about.
Now lenin seems to be hunting red herrings himself. Of course those activists who campaign against factory farming and animal cruelty, vivisections, etc, also tend to be opponents of hunting. these also include the minority of bewildered obscurantist fanatics who oppose vivisection, and who have waged a right wing terrorist campaign against medical reseachers.
But Lenin is pulling a sleight of hand to conclude from overlap among activists mans that the social consensus against hunting overlaps with any social consensus against factory farming
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:35 am
Engels and Andy Newman may be pro fox hunting, at least Engels used the excuse that it was to get some cavalry training in before the revolution, Andy has none.
There is a good socialist tradition of opposing cruelty to animals, I guess cats are not socialists.
The big cruelties are not hunting but factory farming and vivesection….incidentally the vivesectors are more concerned with monopoly profit than helping the sick.
Cruelty, on balance, its a difficult moral judgement but I tend to be against…I live in the countryside by the way.
Comment by Derek Wall — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:44 am
Gail, please explain to me what the reality is, if the ‘they’re all toffs’ argument is false. Are you telling me that farm workers etc go riding in the hunt and are handed the stirrup cup by a merchant banker? Yeh, right.
Hunting is (and always has been) an important and visible proclamation and reinforcer of class hierarchy. The rituals of hunting are part of this and the final bloody end of a ’successful’ hunt merely indicates how thin the veneer of civilised behaviour is amongst the upper and middle classes. The pro-hunting propaganda whining about prejudice, along with the usual panoply of right wing ‘views’ adds to the unsavouriness of hunters and their apologists. They don’t deserve or need fascistic ‘back to nature’ bullshit justifications by the likes of Andy Newman.
Comment by Doug — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:44 am
“also tend to be opponents of hunting. these also include the minority of bewildered obscurantist fanatics who oppose vivisection, and who have waged a right wing terrorist campaign against medical reseachers.”
Now that’s a sweeping statement….!! I opposed vivisection as a teenager (btw I changed my mind after I read Steven Rose on the subject) along with others and I wouldn’t describe them or myself as ‘bewildered obscurantist fanatics’ (unhelpful language I must say….’terrorist’,'fanatics’ this is how the State describes anyone who shows dissent or is critical).
And yes, I am appalled by the campaigns against medical researchers, it is utterly wrong.
But the problem is that you are lumping everyone together who opposes animal cruelty, whether it be vivisection and/or hunting, factory farming and so on.
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:53 am
Derek, if my dogs kill a rabbit I eat it.
Did Engels eat his foxes, I think I have a better “excuse”.
The comrades here are missing the point.
The massacre of 92 million small birds and mammals is not a force of nature, it is a direct consequence of a deliberate practice of keeping domestic cats.
Louise for example says she has no problem keeping catsm and having them kill animals. But she thinks that someone who keeps a dog and watches it kill an animal is cruel. What is the difference, is it the watching that makes it cruel?
Dogs kill cleanly and quickly, particularly sight hounds kill their prey with a shake of the head that instantly breaks the neck of the prey.
Cats and ferrets play with their live prey, drawing out the pain of dying for several minutes.
But we learn from the anti-hunting comrades here, that in their view hunting with dogs is cruel, but it is not cruel to deliberatley introduce a domestic cat into an envirnment where it inevitably torture and kill hundreds of prey animals, indeed over the course of its life thousands of prey animals?
Anyway, you have mainly answered my question. ou don’t care about the cruelty of cats because you like cats; you want to ban hunting because you just don’t like the people who do it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:54 am
Hunting puts human beings back into the animal world, in all it blood, snot and guts and the hormonal thrill of sensual experience.
Like others here, I feel there’s a real problem with embracing the ‘thrill of sensual experience’ involving the totally unnecessary killing of another living creature. There’s all sorts of activities one could engage in to experience the ‘hormonal thrill of sensual experience’ that are nevertheless immoral.
Besides, ‘the animal world, in all it blood, snot and guts’ involves being the prey as well as the predator. Is there a good socialist argument for humans being hunted, as well as being hunters? Fleeing from a pack of dogs and getting shot at would be one hell of a ‘hormonal thrill’ after all…
I have always thought it was shocking hypocrisy that so many townies oppose hunting, that kills a tiny number of animals; and usually kills them clean and quick; and yet they happily eat chickens that have spent their entire short life in pain and torment
Absolutely, and I’ve had this argument with many people, and people have argued with me about not eating meat, but still wearing leather shoes, etc. We’re all a little (or a lot) inconsistent in how we live out our political and moral values, but I would argue against the hypocrisy in a way that ends up delegitimising killing, rather than legitimising more of it. And, by the way, I never understood the argument in favour of ‘humane’ farming of meat, it always struck me as like the line about the slaves in Gone With The Wind, ‘but you know we never treated them like that’…
Comment by ibs — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:02 am
I dislike unnecessary cruelty..
Comment by Derek Wall — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:04 am
What a totally bizarre posting.
For the record I agree with Lenin but, really, describing cats as “cruel”… well lets not even go there.
I notice Saint Obama is sending thousands of extra US troops to Afghanistan, hopefully they’ll sort out any cruel cats (double meaning) they come across.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:05 am
“Anyway, you have mainly answered my question. ou don’t care about the cruelty of cats because you like cats; you want to ban hunting because you just don’t like the people who do it.”
What a surreal argument! Btw: Dogs too have a tendency to ‘play’ with their live prey the same as cats. It is not about ‘liking’ cats or even dogs but they are predators. And also humans train dogs to hunt and kill.
But you can’t compare cats or even dogs behaviour to humans…!! Do I really need to explain why?
Frankly, there are more humane ways of getting your adrenalin rush to the head, away from this spurious argument of the ’sensual’ natural world, with all its blood and guts visceral…. You can keep it..
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:08 am
Would never want to go hunting, but wen’t fishing as a nipper…so…..
While there is still factory farming complaining about hunting seems weird. One is a tradition played out by a small section of the population, the other capitalistic exploitation
of both humans and animals.
There are too many cats, and I write as someone who has one. With a bell the size of big ben and who gets bullied by pigeons!!
Comment by fred — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:10 am
Louise #18 “Dogs too have a tendency to ‘play’ with their live prey the same as cats.”
Well I have been hunting with dogs on and off for 30 years and I have never seen that. And hunting is not about causing suffering or killing, it is about observing and appreciating the skill of the dog and learning the habitat and way of life of the quarry.
I am not comparing human behaviour to cats and dogs.
i am comparing two specific human behaviours;
i) hunting with dogs
ii deliberately introducing a domestic cat into a habitat
(It is for eaxmple interesting that anti-hunting people always focus on fox hunting, without acknoledging that they have also outlawed hunting rabbits)
Eddie is correct that i was wrong to describe the behaviour of cats as “cruel”, that was poor use of language by me. The question is that cats do kill animals with a great deal of prolonged suffering.
The anti-hunting lobby is opposed to people hunting with dogs; but has nothing to say it seems about the deliberate introdction by peoeple of domestsic cats into habitats where this will lead to slaughter and suffering of prey animals.
What is the difference?
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:19 am
Louise #19
“Frankly, there are more humane ways of getting your adrenalin rush to the head, away from this spurious argument of the ’sensual’ natural world, with all its blood and guts visceral…. You can keep it..”
But we can’t keep it, becasue the governmenr has banned it.
Don’t make out you are in favour of free choice when you clearly support government suppression of hunting.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:20 am
#13 “Hunting is (and always has been) an important and visible proclamation and reinforcer of class hierarchy”
I think it is perfectly OK to be against hunting not just on the unnecessary cruelty grounds but also on the grounds of objecting to the power structure of rural England. The hunt is the ultimate expression of the county set saying “we own all this land, and you can only be here on our terms” ie to be their grateful cap-doffing loyal servants/beaters/ghillies.
Comment by Strategist — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:25 am
“but has nothing to say it seems about the deliberate introdction by peoeple of domestsic cats into habitats where this will lead to slaughter and suffering of prey animals.”
Has it occurred to you that cats also keep down the rodent population.
The ’slaughter and suffering’…? Yeah, well the next time Tiddles wanders out for the night, I will warn them, ‘none of that slaughtering and suffering’…. And indeed I am sure Tiddles believes they are one biggest bad assed cruel moggie who rules the street, woe betide any Peter Wabbits or Robin Redbreasts who crosses Tiddles path….
Next you’ll be arguing they are the Hannibal Lectors of the animal world!! I feel the need to organise a campaign, ‘Cats…they are soooo misunderstood’…
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 11:29 am
My cat ventures out into the night clutching an AK assault rifle and wearing a Rambo-esque sweatband. Sometimes I hear shooting. I ask no questions when Tiddles comes back…
Comment by Faust — 18 February, 2009 @ 12:02 pm
My Lurcher is brilliant! Lurchers are a poacher’s dog, a real legacy of the rural class war.
Once, only the nobility were allowed to hunt with dogs in the field. They had greyhounds that occupied the middle of the field.
But the rural worker / poacher would have a lurcher. The lurcher sneaks around the edge of the field, and disassociates itself from me - or any other owner. That’s a legacy of avoiding having your legs broken by the gamekeeper, the bosses man.
Yeah, so I get the odd rabbit!
But the foxhunt is clearly a ritual of the rich. Badger baiting was a ritual of the rural workers. I don’t like either. And if the latter was banned, then so should the former have been.
Buts thats different from the lurcher getting me a rabbit for the pot.
AND crucially - its easier to fill the pot with ROADKILL! Yummy! See loads of it when I’m peddling along on me bike. (Just hope I don’t become part of it oneday!)).
Comment by Barry Kade — 18 February, 2009 @ 12:18 pm
Remember the Contryside Alliance. Here is the SPGB leafet for that event . Much more fun than hunting animals !!!
`The Right to Hunt Landowners’
The good old English sport of sending hungry hunting hounds to chase
aristocrats through the woods, catch them and rip them to pieces, has
been slow to take off as a popular pastime. Despite claims that these
predatory parasites are a foul rural presence, serving only to infect
the countryside with their conceited greed and indolence, it has been
hard to find dogs with sufficient brutality to enjoy the so-called
sport. Those who favour such hunts claim that it is nothing more than
a healthy rural tradition, misunderstood by town dwellers, and that
ripping duchesses and viscounts to shreds is the most human way to
rid nature of those who have only survived historically by plundering
and murdering others. The Royal Society for the Protection of Useless
Aristocrats has been long split on the issue, with one section
accepting that such blood sport is “just a bit of harmless fun”,
while others prefer the idea of culling – or permanent quarantine in
the House of Lords.
This laboured account would be funnier were it not for the harsh
reality that rich, privileged, barbaric bullies, most of whom are
brutalised at birth by hereditary right and public-school
conditioning, do indeed defend their right to chase around the
countryside with packs of hounds in order to savage and tear apart
defenceless animals. Their callous defence is mounted in the name of
sport. And because it is traditional for these parasitical killer to
dress up in the costumes of their class and indulge their pleasure in
watching deer, foxes and other animals being ripped apart, they
respond with well-rehearsed cries of arrogant immunity to human
behaviour when their ritualised sadism is opposed.
These depraved beings, who rejoice in their right to inflict pain on
animals, are in the same class and historic tradition as those who
proclaim the inviolable right to cast the peasant off their land and
into destitution and starvation. The same haters of freedom who
smashed down the communal utopia of the Diggers when those early
communists sought to hold the land in common as a store of wealth
for all; the same bullies who until a century ago enjoyed the
propertied right to flog peasants and rape their daughters, and still
today treat those who work on the land as if they are indebted to the
landowners who steal the fruits of their labour. Looking at this
savage minority of ruthless parasites, bleating their message of
outrage against those reformists (destined to parliamentary defeat)
who dare question their freedom to kill for pleasure, it is hard not
to wish on them the fate of a frightened cornered fox, surrounded by
a pack of dogs trained for the kill.
That, however, is not the socialist way. Why should we lower
ourselves to their brutal customs? As Shelley reminded us: “We are
many, they are few.” They are not worth the bullets which it would
take to shoot them. Nor are they important enough to lead us from our
hostility to the cause of violence, however guilty the victim has
been conditioned to become. No the aristocrats need not fear our
blood sports; the victory of our consciousness of human solidarity
over theirs of class oppression will be reward enough for us.
But look what these parasites are doing to the land. They spray it
with chemical pesticides, killing off whole species of birds,
butterflies and plant life in their quest for profits. They have fed
cattle upon cheap and lousy diets, creating the BSE crisis and whole
varieties of food adulteration which makes us and our children all
the potential victims of their profit-lust. They have dumped millions
of tons of soil into the rivers which pollute the water which we are
charged to drink. They have pursued, in the name of
efficient “factory farming”, the most obscene practices of cruelty to
animals which are tortured for the sake of making a few more pounds
for their avaricious owners. They have contracted out farm management
to City firms which seek to push down agricultural wages, casualised
skilled farm work, thrown wage-slave-farm-workers onto the scrap-heap
of the unemployed, and destroyed whole rural areas in the name of
agribusiness.
The landowners, who protest for their freedom to enjoy themselves in
exhibitions of collective brutality, remain free to rape and
vandalise the countryside. As Graham Harvey observed in his book The
Killing of the Countryside, “they [the landowners] favour a
countryside devoted entirely to industrial-scale food production,
with the products traded on world commodity markets in exactly the
same way as coffee and copper…Since this `progressive’ view of
farming is supported by big business and the City, it is the one most
likely to prevail. If so, the current losses of birds and flowers
from our landscape will turn out to be merely the first casualties in
a long process of attrition.”
The beneficiaries of this rural plunder are the very few. One percent
of the population owns half the land in Britain and two percent owns
three-quarters of it. A mere 600 landowners own half the land in
Scotland. These capitalist-farmers are subsidised by huge grants to
support their manipulation of the market. They receive millions of
pounds and euros in return for taking land out of cultivation so as
to keep profits up.
Their protest for the right to hunt and murder animals for fun is no
more worthy of support than a campaign to reintroduce slavery or to
bring back the deportation of criminals. What is a worthy campaign is
the one to rid the world of the parasites we have described above and
their counterparts the world over, who will stop at nothing to make a
profit, whether through our toil and sweat or the plunder of the
natural environment. This same campaign envisages the workers of the
world uniting to take control of the planet on behalf of its rightful
owners, to free production from the artificial constraints of profit
and to establish a global system of society in which each person has
free access to the benefits of production. If you agree with us,
even only slightly, then please get in touch.
Comment by ajohnstone — 18 February, 2009 @ 12:51 pm
I live in a small Scottish village and my opposition to hunting is unashamedly absolutely nothing to do with animal welfare - and much greater now I’ve seen its social context close up than I ever did while living in London.
Many times I’ve had to wait while some bastard with a shotgun stands in the road stopping the traffic while the hunt trots slowly across literally looking down on everyone else.
It’s a small population and I recognise a lot of these people - a mixture of the remnants of the local aristocracy, the large farmers, the elite professionals, second homeowners (some of the most enthusiastic) etc. Of course there are some hoi polloi there too - in fact I work with one hunter - but their presence only serves to obscure the essence of the hunt as a reinforcing the position of the elite for whom it’s a chance to play at feudalism.
Watching these people at play while local post offices are closed, bus routes cut and housing remains well out of the reach of the people who carry their gear round for them is the only issue for me.
What cats may or may not do in the cities, and whether it brings the rich closer to nature, is nothing to do with it.
Comment by Mike v2.0 — 18 February, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
#23
Louise
OK, cats keep down the vermin population, but not very effectively, how many rats are there in London? 10 million?; I know that the rat population of Bristol overtook the human population during the 1980s.
Are you seriously arguing that people keep pet cats to keep down rodents? they keep them as pets, and are oblivous or don’t care about the impact on the local bird and small mammals.
I am not against cats. I am pointing out that urban cat owners deliberately introduce a predator into a habitat where they are responsible for a huge kill of small prey animals - 92 million kills per year - many of those kills prolonged and agonising deatsh for the prey as they are played with. If people didn’t keep domestic cats as pets, there would be a more diverse urban wildlife habitat, and also less animal suffering.
People have a choice, they choose to get a cat, and they choose to let it roam the streets and gardens to each cat kills litterly thousands of small birds and mammals per year.
For the same urban cat owners to say that people hunting with dogs is cruel is rank hypocrisy.
If hunting with dogs is banned, then keeping cats should also be baned. If you agree woth banning hunting with dogs, but also defend the practice of keeping domestic cats in urban environments, then you are clearly saying that the ban on hunting dogs is nothing to do with animal welfare, and everything to do with thinking the law should uphold your lifestyle choices, while supressing other peoples lifestyle choices.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:04 pm
Mike v2 at #27 and Barry #25
In the original article I clearly said:
You have to seperate out the very good reasons that lots of people can’t stand fox hunts, and even worse stag hunts, with dogs, that are to do with the class make up of the hunts, etc.
But we don’t have to accept the arguments of the anti-hunting lobby that then extend that to Barry with his lurcher, and ban all hunting with dogs.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:07 pm
Any law suppresses someone else’s “lifestyle choice”.
Comment by Mike v2.0 — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:08 pm
#30 - for sure, laws restrict hat people can do.
But surely that has to be based upon some consistent social consensus?
ther shouldn’t be a law banning an activity simply becasue some people don’t like it.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
so concern with cruelty is a bad reason for opposing violence…nature may be full of injustice so socialism is an indulgence, according to Andy’s logic.
Comment by Derek Wall — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
#23 Louise:
Ok, that is quite amusing. but it comes over very strange from someone who supports the criminalisation of exactly the same attitude from someone with a whippet or lurcher who takes the occasional rabbit
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:17 pm
#32
Derek that argument only works if you accept that hunting is cruel, which i don’t.
or if you think that hunting is incompatible with socialism, which it isn’t.
And if you do think humting is cruel, then surely so is fishing? And indeed most animal husbandry?
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:19 pm
I had an arguement with a hunter in a cornish pub, I was there working, she was a local (and a bit middle class). she was outraged that Blair could ban hunting, ‘he has no right! etc etc. I asked if she thought he had the right to send young working class men and women to die in Iraq, ‘She wasn’t bothered’ i told her to fuck off, not very constructive, but i think she got the point.
Comment by non-partisan — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:26 pm
Andy, No matter how much I would have liked to have lectured many of my cats about not hunting down small animals for food or fun I somehow don’t think they would have taken much notice! I can’t see the logic in your argument and it is one surreal argument about banning cats (!?!?) and hunting with dogs. To compare the two is utterly ….surreal….
Again, do I have to explain the differences between humans and cats?
Also, fox hunting is still happening, as they are finding loopholes in the ban, so much for the ban. I don’t see it as the same as some lone dog hunting a rabbit that will end up on the table.
It is what hunting, pack style, represents. Where animals are harried into a corner and ripped apart. It is cruel and barbaric, described as ’sport’. But the politics of what these hunts represent and the class position of these people, is also what I loathe.
Give me a murderous, Tony Soprano-esque moggie (and pets are good company, relieve stress and are loyal…well with cats that debatable…) or a lurcher any day as opposed to some toff who relishes the kill of a fox!
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:33 pm
Thought provoking argument Andy - you’ve given me something to ponder. It is worth stressing that the figures are preliminary though.
Comment by SteveF — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
Andy, I couldn’t agree with you more - or as Joseph Heller used to point out, what I really mean is I couln’t agree with you less.
This fascination with the banning of hunting with dogs is inexplicable. Not that it has actually stopped hunting or led to a more “humanitarian” way of culling foxes. The anti-hunting arguments have no merit whatever. I’ve never seen a demo outside an abbatoir or a chicken factory, but when it comes to the cuddly foxes…
The banning of hunting with dogs was disgraceful. Your son has more sense than the whole
anti-hunting lobby put together: “…but they are dogs! They enjoy hunting! That is what dogs do.” Strangely, the whole anti-hunting shebang was a very middle-class affair.
Forget the disgraceful “British jobs for British workers”, what we need is a League of Gentelemn-style law: “Rural laws for rural people!”
I’m with James Joyce when it comes to dogs. Actually, I’d go further and would like to see the introduction of the hunting of dogs by humans. Then we can turn our sights on the cats. Anyone ever eaten dog or cat? I have no idea if the selling of cat or dog meat is actually illegal but if it isn’t, and if anyone knows where it’s served, I’d be delighted to feast on a leg of Fido or a loin of Tiddles.
Comment by Tawfiq Chahboune — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
Louise,
“Andy, No matter how much I would have liked to have lectured many of my cats about not hunting down small animals for food or fun I somehow don’t think they would have taken much notice! I can’t see the logic in your argument and it is one surreal argument about banning cats (!?!?) and hunting with dogs. To compare the two is utterly ….surreal….”
I rather think you are missing Andy’s point. The essence (at least for me) of it is the impact upon animals and animal populations. Hunting kills foxes. This is deemed by many to be a bad thing. Owning a cat, particularly in an urban area, kills birds. But isn’t generally seen as a bad thing.
It begins to look like a double standard, particularly when you consider that (if this research is true), owning cats has a massively greater impact upon animal populations. 92 million animals is not trivial and nor is a “significant impact” upon urban bird populations.
I’ve been thinking about getting a cat, but as someone concerned about British wildlife, this article has made me seriously reconsider. Presumably other people who are similarly concerned should be open minded about the impact of cat ownership on our native fauna.
Comment by SteveF — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:47 pm
Now all you need do is find a link between domestic cats and SWP policy/heresy and you’ll be set.
Comment by Roobin — 18 February, 2009 @ 1:55 pm
Yes, cats do indeed play with their prey before killing them. Andy Newman has belatedly discovered that nature isn’t quite as pretty as rural sentimentalists would have us believe.
But if he thinks that cats are cruel, what does he make of the thousands of species of parasitic wasps that lay their eggs in live caterpillars? The eggs hatch inside the host and the larvae begin to devour the caterpillar from the inside making sure not to kill it until they have completed their grisly work, and are ready to metamorphose.
The behaviour of these tiny wasps was one of the things that led Charles Darwin to break with the idea that nature had been planned by a benevolent deity. Nonetheless, the wasps happen to be useful, since they are a better solution than pesticides to keep down the population of certain agricultural pests
Perhaps Andy thinks we shouldn’t make use of such natural pest control, because the wasps are horribly cruel to the caterpillars.
As for the supposed folly of introducing cats into cities – the whole urban ecosystem is artificial, and we have made it very hostile to the predators that small mammals would face in the wild (such as weasels and hawks). The domestic cat has become the top predator in cities, and that is not always a bad thing.
“Small mammals” sounds much cuter than rats and mice, which is what we’re really talking about. You think people keep cats as pets, rather than for vermin control – but the two go together. When I lived in a London house that had several cats, we were delighted when they regularly caught mice. The cats were protecting our food supply. The most persuasive theory as to why humans domesticated cats in the first place (probably in ancient Egypt) was to get rid of the rodents who were munching their way through the granaries.
People have a visceral dislike of rats, but the house mouse is no better. Like its larger cousin it spreads disease, and if it gets into your larder, apart from eating its way through any exposed food, it will leave a trail of urine and droppings all over the place. So I have no problem with cats killing millions of mice.
I do regret the death of song birds – but much more serous problems facing British birds are intensive farming practices, and the removal of hedgerows where so many species nest.
Comment by paul fauvet — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:02 pm
#36 Louise:
But how are dogs different from cats? Do you think my whippet can understand that he shouldn’t want to chase squirrels and rabbits?
You have chosen to introduce a cat into an urban environmentn where it WILL kill birds. This is socially accpetable and legal.
If I take my dog for a walk in a field where there are rabbits, it WILL chase them and might kill them. This is socially unacceptable and illegal.
Both are human activities. Both a conscious choice to intriduce a predator into a specific environment. But One legal, one illegal, And I see very little difference between them.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:04 pm
#40
Paul.
I have no problem with cats per se. I accept them for being what they are.
I am not the one with a double standard.
And when you say: “I do regret the death of song birds – but much more serous problems facing British birds are intensive farming practices, and the removal of hedgerows where so many species nest.”
This simply isn’t true. The biggest decline is in South East England, and London in particular.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:07 pm
I feel sorry for all the Plankton in the sea who merrily go about their business then a f*cking great whale come along and swallows millions of them!
What are you do-gooders going to do about saving Plankton?
Comment by Im Brian. No I'm Brian — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
Why are we having this discussion?
Cant understand why anyone in their right or “left” mind(unless their name is Living Marxism which was never left any)way should want to agree to the vile sport of “hunting”,especially fox hunting, unless they are members of the stinking rotting ruling class or their social climbing hangers on(some welsh miners included!!who? what? where?) or others who continue to doff their cap to the festuring parasitic racist abusive so called “Royal family”…that oh so well known beloved oh so democratic institition we all just so love which we all voted for in the first place.
Take back the land!
Boot out hunting!
Boot out the racist imperialist ruling class Royals!
Comment by Rotting carcass — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:12 pm
I think the answer might be to counsel cats, and rid them of these destructive tendencies.
Comment by Faust — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:14 pm
This is a bizarre post Andy, I don’t know where to start.
all about enforcing social conformity of urban sentimentality onto country dwellers.
I lived for 18 years practically in the countryside, next to a farm for one thing, and everytime I saw wealthy landowners and feudal relics charging across the landscape disrupting the lives of anyone else who had the presumption to want to use or enjoy the landscape, why, I got such a swell of pride that we country dwellers we’re getting one over those soft urban types.
Also, don’t you live in Swindon? Presumably a large town not some rural idyll.
Comment by Duncan — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:19 pm
Why attempt to defend the sport of the aristocracy?
Comment by Martin Wisse — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
I remember seeing my uncle, a game keeper, feeding thousands of Pheasants early one morning, a splendid sight as they swooped down to gather the dried berries and nut mixture that he had strewn in a clearing. Only that a few weeks later the manor house was full of the shooters polishing their guns ready to blast these thousands of specially reared birds out of the sky,for ’sport’. Not much difference to factory farming when you think about it.
‘The guns’ as they liked to call themselves were in the majority very similar to those who ‘ride to hound’ a middle-class pseudo aristo of well heeled snobs. When I was offered the opportunity to eat pheasant for lunch I left the table, finally getting one of the kitchen assistants to give a cheese sandwich.
Lenin, louise and Derek amongst others have got it right. Perhaps louise its a muzzle next time Tiddles ventures out?
Comment by Pete Brown — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
Incidently, basing your entire post on a BBC article about a research project that is set up to test the assumption that some 92 million animals are killed each year by household cats –not a smart move. The BBC hasn’t the best reputation when it comes to reporting on science issues.
Common sense (not always a good guide, admittedly) says that “a typical urban cat” killing some 5 animals a day seems unlikely.
Comment by Martin Wisse — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
“I think the answer might be to counsel cats, and rid them of these destructive tendencies.”
Faust, indeed, there are so many pet therapists (not like it is money for old rope and they are making a quick buck or anything…perish the thought!) out there who can counsel and analyse those destructive tendencies learned at such a tender age in many a moggie. Whether individual therapy is the answer or a more group dynamic will get to the core of these murderous impulses…. We may be able to elicit an insight from the use of ‘primal miaow’….
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:28 pm
Wearing our pro or anti hunting badges is about as much use as our pro or anti religious ones. It’s not going to take us very far.
I don’t have any pets and feel uneasy with any animal that could do damage and can’t be reasoned with.
Except baby elephants of course. Who can resist.
As this is a free vote I’ll go with the sentimentalists on this one.
Animals don’t have rights but humans have imaginations.
Comment by paulv — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:30 pm
Pete: “Lenin, louise and Derek amongst others have got it right. Perhaps louise its a muzzle next time Tiddles ventures out?”
Hark…a muzzle for Tiddles! Tiddles is starting to look like Hannibal Lector more and more.
Comment by Louise — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:32 pm
Andy, notwithstanding some of the primitivist sentiments expressed in your original post (personally I will stand steadfast against any socialist project that seeks to recontextualise me in the ‘natural’ world), I agree entirely with what you have said.
The point you raised - comparing the treatment given to factory farming and foxhunting - is significant because it demonstrates the majoritarian character of the ban. It shows that rather than being about the consistent application of a principle, it is in fact about the majority seeking to clamp down on a minority whose lifestyle decisions make the majority feel queezy and uncomfortable.
As such you should show a bit more solidarity than you did in your original post to urban dwellers like me who love their cheap selaphane rapped meat, preferably prepared by mcdonalds. We are also about to face a clamp down from an incipient disapproving majority.
Comment by Reuben — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:33 pm
Perhaps the hunters are part of Andy Newman’s ‘imagined community’? Christ, he’ll be quoting Henry Williamson next.
Comment by Doug — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:33 pm
Andy is right that this is a symbolic issue of course, and that the fox hunt ban (which is hardly a ban, as there are more loopholes in the law then there are in Gordon’s attempt to limit banker bonuses) was used as a sop by New Labour to their old skool cadres. It’s the absurd comparison with keeping cats and the baseless acussations of hypocrisy that push this post into Spiked Online territory, a willingness to be provocative and contrarian for the sake of it.
Comment by Martin Wisse — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
“a willingness to be provocative and contrarian for the sake of it”
No, for the whole 34 or 35 years that I have been active, man and boy, in the labour movement I have been a staunch supporter of hunting. And although I live in Swindon now, I originally come from the much more rural Saltford, just outside keynsham, that when I grew up there had a population of about 1000.
The comparison between cat ownership and hunting with dogs is not at all absurd, if it gets people to think about wat they are really objecting to.
Both cat ownership and hunting with dogs are conscious human decisions to introduce predators into a defined habitat. One is socially sacnctioned, the other is socially ostracised and now illegal. There is a moral inconsistency.
And several people have justified the ban with their understandable class revulsion against the nobs who go fox hunting. OK, I accept that, but it really has nothing to do with the ethics or morality of hunting at all, does it?
And why include in the ban greyhounds, lurchers and whippets taking rabbits? And the only prosecutions there have been under the bill I beleive were two working class men from Scotland who were hunting for the pot.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:55 pm
#53 Reuben “As such you should show a bit more solidarity than you did in your original post to urban dwellers like me ”
Good job you didn’t read the first draft, before I toned it down then!
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 2:56 pm
As a young guy in the 1970sI indulged in the sport of street fighting,unfortunately I ended up with 4 criminal convictions for this,1 for mugging,1for fighting at the football,1for fighting after the football and 1for stomping this guys head who had hurt a mate of mine a couple of months before. (they jailed me for that one at age 16) 4 times caught and convicted but of course for every once caught I took part 20-25 times.Now then the buzz of this sport was brilliant! the aesthetics of the sport was exhilirating,running through the streets mob-handed,the screams,the shouts,the breaking glass,the blood,the terror in the eyes of the local inhabitants.Oh happy days! Country boys and their wussy sports such as fox hunting and badger baiting and whatever it is that they do to rabbits should try street fighting for a truly enervating buzz that compares with sexual and drug experimentation! Why does it feel so existentially good? Because country boys your “quarry” can hurt you back! Believe me Andy you do not need to be a fox to get a great buzz from being scared witless.In the sport of street fighting both individually and collectivley you can be the hunted which pumps so much adrenaline into you,you can taste it hours later. Anyway look forward for the campaign to legalise the old working class sport of street fighting!! On a serious note this background stood me in good stead for the pickets of the miners strike,wapping welling timex etc As to animal welfare these horrible dichotomies are a product of Capitalist production.If pets are managed and given humane enviroments it is better for both humans and animals,if livestock is given humane managed enviroments the meat both tastes better and is healthier for humans so it is better for both humans and animals.
Comment by Anonymous — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
sorry, last comment was mine
Comment by catperson — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
off topic but important: Jacques Bino, a trade union activist was killed last night in Pointe-à-Pitre/Guadeloupe (not known so far by whom) … there is a general strike since 20th January on Guadeloupe, police repression was increasing during the last days
Comment by Entdinglichung — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:19 pm
Andy Newman is quite wrong to blame cats for the decline in numbers of urban song birds.
One of the birds that has suffered catastrophic decline in London is the house sparrow. Considerable research has been done on why sparrows are in decline, and this has ruled out predation by cats as a significant factor.
The most serious problem is that a large number of sparrow chicks starve to death because their parents cannot find enough insects and spiders to feed them. There are several possible reasons for the decline in insect numbers – including the use of pesticides in gardens, air pollution, the mania for having tidy gardens that are inimical to wildlife, and the concreting over of so many front gardens.
Furthermore, if a mouse comes within range of a cat, it is probably doomed. The same is not true of a sparrow. Anyone who has ever watched a cat stalking a bird knows that most of the time the bird gets away, since birds can fly and cats can’t.
The basic fact of predation, whether on the plains of the Serengeti, or in a London garden, is that the animals most likely to die are the very young, the very old, the sick and the injured. It may sound horrible to our sensitivities, but predation improves the average health of the species preyed upon. That’s one of the ways natural selection works.
Andy dismisses my concern with farming practices, but the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds would disagree with him. A RSPB report from 1997 linked pesticides with declining bird populations, as well as changes in agricultural practices, such as making silage instead of hay, thereby removing food and cover for bird and insect populations earlier in the season.
Comment by paul fauvet — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:40 pm
As we would say in Scotland “You’re talking pish Andy”. The cats are doing what comes naturally to them as hunters and it is human’s anthropomorphism that sees anything morally wrong in this.
Folk setting off on horseback in pursuit of an animal to assist in it being killed as cruelly as possible (i.e. being torn to death)however is morally wrong because we should know better - or do you line up with the Social Darwinists in seeing human nature as irredeemably red in tooth and claw? Not much hope for socialism there then!
Andy do you really approve of children being bloodied by having the fox’s still warm blood smeared over their faces by their grinning idiots of parents?
We don’t “introduce” dogs into areas where there are foxes and then let them get on with it. We have to train dogs to hunt foxes - dogs would usually go after much easier prey if left to their own devices - the very same chickens and young lambs that foxes prey on actually.
I’ve not yet had to instruct my cats on how to go about hunting nor have I rubbed the blood of small birds all over my daughter’s face - to do so would demonstrate a degree of psychopathy usually only to be found in our upper classes.
I come from a semi-rural area too where we were routinely prevented from taking deer, rabbits, birds(grouse, pheasant) or fish (salmon, trout) for the pot by the very same landowners who took part in fox hunting. But I have always thought that shooting the animals was the closest thing to humane - I have witnessed lurching and its cruel (if natural for the dogs) because the purpose isn’t just to catch the animal but to terrify it thoroughly beforehand.
Best thing I’ve heard in connection with hunting is when the Duke of Buccleuch (second biggest landowner in Scotland) fell of his horse and broke his back whilst out after a fox. Now that I would have paid to see.
Comment by Bill Scott — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Paul
I don’t dismiss you concern about farming practices. I was pointing out that it was a red herriing to this discussion.
Cats simply do kill a lot of birds.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:42 pm
Bill #64
You are missing the point.
Most of your arguments are specific to the rituals of fox hunting. And to be honest there are lots of social and cultural activities in our society that I don’t approve of, but I don’t think it is the job of the criminal law to enforce my cultural preferecnes and lifestyle choices on other people.
So the “I suppose you think it is OK to blood the children” arguement fails really, because I don’t see it as any worse than lots of other perfectly legal things that people do with their kids.
This clearly isn’t true about coursing: “the purpose isn’t just to catch the animal but to terrify it thoroughly beforehand”
The animal is pursued, but the purpose of the pursuit is to catch it, not to terrify it.
If the purpose was to terrify an animal, then you wuld be better off with the hare or rabbit in a cage
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:53 pm
I’m not too far from Andy’s position on hunting, I guess.
But I’m having trouble buying this figure of the average domestic cat killing 5 animals per day. We’re down to one cat at the moment, but not long ago we had three. I saw no evidence that two of them hunted at all, and for the other one, no evidence it was anything more than every few days.
Not too scientific, I know, but I’m skeptical.
Comment by albacore — 18 February, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
As so often, I am honestly baffled by Andy’s thought process. The cat hunts on its own. The dog is set by its owner to hunt. How can one fail to see the difference?
Comment by christian h. — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:01 pm
What’s wrong with blooding, anyway? It just about crosses into the slightly odd column, but not much more than that. All pretty harmless stuff. Nothing to get hot under the collar about.
I wouldn’t want to go out hunting or fishing or any of that great outdoor stuff (a pleasant walk in the country is enough for me), but the idea of banning activities other people enjoy requires a high evidentiary standard that the activity is somehow “wrong”, especially when it has been part of a national culture for hundreds or thousands of years.
Comment by Tawfiq Chahboune — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
#67
Yeah I am a bit sceptial as well on that figure,w hich I heard on the Jeremy Vine show on radio 2, so perhaps it isn’t reliable.
Though it does depend on how much you feed the buggers. I remember when I was a kid and we first moved to the country my parents had two cats, and they stopped feeding them, and the cats must have then been bringing home ten or twenty birds a day, plus rodents, snakes, frogs, just about anything with a pulse. And those were just the kills we saw.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
#68 “The cat hunts on its own. The dog is set by its owner to hunt. How can one fail to see the difference?”
Really. One difference is that one is legal and the other is against the law. Perhaps there is a slight difference, enough to make releasing a cat to kill legal, and releasing a dog to kill a criminal offence?
Take a lurcher or a greyhound or a whippet into a park, and if it sees a squirrel it will chase it. take it into a field and if it sees a rabbit it will chase it.
Let a cat out the door, and if it sees a mouse or bird it will stalk it.
What is the difference between letting a cat into a habitat, and letting a dog into a habitat? Only the fact that you are also physically present?
OK, so what s being punished by the law is the participation of the human being as observer? And these sight-hounds need no more training to hunt than a cat does. And dogs like these have been kept for exactly this purpse for at least 5000 years!
BUt even more bizarre, and the anti-huniting people must really struggle to justify this, is that if I go hunting by putting a ferret down a rabbit hole and netting them, that is completely legal. If I put a terrier down a hole - that is illegal.
if I hunt with a falcon that is legal. (actually hunting rabbits with ferrets to flush them and then catching them with a hawk is becomming more common). if I go fishing, that is legal. If i shoot a rabbit, provided I legally have the correct gun licence, then that is legal.
it is only hunting with dogs that is illegal. How can there be any moral or ethcial consistency in that?
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:22 pm
#63
Paul,
It’s not entirely clear why house sparrows have been in decline. One recent paper on this subject:
De Laet, J. and Summers-Smith, J.D. (2007) The status of the urban house sparrow Passer domesticus in north-western Europe: a review. Journal of Ornithology,
The paper states:
“The urban decline has been the subject of much speculation, but the reason(s) is/are not properly understood. This is clearly an interesting ornithological question.”
One possible contribution to the decline is changing socio-economics:
Shaw, L.M. et al. (2008) The House Sparrow Passer domesticus in urban areas: reviewing a possible link between post-decline distribution and human socioeconomic status. Journal of Ornithology, 149, 293-299.
the authors argue:
“Evidence is mounting that, within urban landscapes, House Sparrows appear to be more prevalent in areas with a relatively low human socioeconomic status. Here, we present evidence to suggest that House Sparrows may have disappeared predominantly from more affluent areas, and that these areas are more likely to have undergone changes to habitat structure. We also show how these changes in habitat could influence House Sparrow populations via impacts upon nesting success, foraging and predation risk.”
Comment by SteveF — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:38 pm
I’m not a “anti-hunting person”. I could care less if you hunt rabbits. But your claim that being anti-hunting and owning a cat is “hypocritical” is simply bizarre. As is your ruralism. You really do sound - to American ears - more and more like Rush Limbaugh.
Comment by christian h. — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
Well you have to understand the UK political context, that over the last eleven years the labour government as really pushed a communitarian agenda around social conformity, and against fear of “the other”, demonising in turn young people “so called “hoodies”) Muslim women who wear the veil, smokers, hunters, and moving on to obese people, and so on; promoting ASBOs, ID cards, CCTV cameras everywhere, etc, etc
The response from the left has been largely inadequate, because there has not been a consistent philosophical and ideological response to the encroaching power of the state, nor any determined defence of the rigts of individuals to make unpopular or eccentric lifestyle choices.
Instead much of the left has applauded the use of state power to impose social conformity against targets that it also finds unpopular, like smokers and hunters.
But the point about opposing the state imposing social conformity, is that you also have to accept that this means the right of pople to pursie lifestyle choices that you personally don’t like or approve of. FFS - some people play golf!
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:51 pm
The smoking ban is nothing to do with social conformity Andy, it is a basic health and safety measure, campaigned for by unions with bar and restaurant workers and already with proven benefits in workers health;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/7879891.stm
It’s been a massive success in Scotland, your hopelessly libertarian position is, well, hopeless.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:58 pm
But Andy, what you are advocating is not “a consistent philosophical and ideological response” to anything. Smoking, for example, is not simply an “unpopular or eccentric lifestyle choice” with no effect on your fellow human beings. And it is quite obviously very different from political expression.
Comment by christian h. — 18 February, 2009 @ 4:59 pm
Dogs are for those who want a companion that will follow orders. But that needs its shit sorted out.
Comment by skidmarx — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:02 pm
Eddie, you are quoting the welcome health beenfits of a complete ban.
But the range of policy choices was not limited to the two extremes of doing nothing, or a complete ban.
There was also the intermediate position of allowing premises to apply for a smoking licence, that would borne with it a stringent requirement for air purification and extraction systems, and for smoke free working areas to protect staff.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:13 pm
Andy are you transforming before our very eyes into the new Nick Cohen…I think we should be told.
When I was a Wiltshire lad some decades ago, a traditional sport was to go and sab the Beaufort Hunt….others were no doubt setting up groups to go and strangle cats.
What varied experiences there are of the Wiltshire left…
Comment by Derek Wall — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:16 pm
#76
Christain, you are a bit out of your depth here about the specifics of British politics.
The promotion of social conformity has not been about “political” dissent, but about a communitarian aganda of stigmatising all difference. This has been most clear with the ASBO legislation, and the key concept for new labour of “anti-social behaviour”. the givernment has created 700+ new criminal offenses in the last 11 years.
Many of the behaviours over which ASBOs have been served have some negative effect on other people, whether it is playing football against a neighbours wall, or skateboarding in a pedestrian area, or playing loud music. Smoking in the presence of non-smokers is inconsiderate, for sure.
The question is whether these are areas where the criminal law should step in. Should being inconsiderate sufficient to make you a criminal? Should pursuing an unpopular hobby that other people disapprove make you a criminal?
My belief is that there should be a presumption against using the criminal law to outlaw behaviour unless there is a very strong argument that such behaviour is actually harmful to others or harmfull to society. That is a consistent philosophical and ideological position.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:22 pm
#79
No Derek, I am arguing exactly the same positions on smoking and hunting that I have always held.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:24 pm
#79 Derek - “When I was a Wiltshire lad some decades ago, a traditional sport was to go and sab the Beaufort Hunt”
Indeed Derek, and I am sure that we have some mutual friends who have sabbed that hunt.
But as you know, there is more than a little class politics in the opposition to fox hunting, and particularly that hunt!
We should be careful before we extrapolate that into a blanket condemnation of everyone who takes their lurcher lamping, or who shoots the odd hare.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:28 pm
In terms of wildlife in the countryside, Rabbits are an immense problem and foxes keep them down.
Or would, except farmers breed pheasants and partridges for money, which compete with wild birds for food.
So the farmers, who also breed chickens, tend to shoot the foxes and used to hunt them.
In my book foxes are beneficial predators which keep the rabbits down.
They also do a pretty good job on grey squirrels, which also need controlling if not eradicating in favour of reds.
So, short of a rabies epidemic, I’d be in favour of allowing fox numbers to increase.
Besides which fox hunters are mostly upper class pratts who ride horses, or else their working class hangers-on from the local pub. So my sympathies have always been with the sabs.
As to hunting, there’s nothing to stop people having a firearms licence and going out shooting rabbits. I know people who do and feed them to their ferrets.
Plenty of people shoot pheasants too. I’d be more impressed by hunters who used bows, or were prepared to wrestle with lions barehanded. It sortof evens out the odds.
Personally I feed wild birds and there are loads about, but luckily I hardly ever see mice or rats in my patch. So the cats are alright by me.
Comment by prianikoff — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
Andy is also misusing statistics. If there are nine million domestic cats in Britain, and they kill 92 million small mammals and birds a year, that’s an average of 10.2 kills per cat per year - not the five kills per day Andy gives.
92 million sounds a lot - but there are, at last count, 61 million humans in Britain. So cat predation brings about the death of 1.5 wild animals per human being per year. Put that way, the figure is not particularly alarming.
A figure in the BBC story which I find much more serious is that the British population eats 1.5 billion - billion! - fish a year. It’s pretty certain that most of these fish do not come from sustainably managed fish farms, but are trawled from the oceans by the voracious EU fishing fleets.
Many commercial fisheries are near collapse, yet still we go on sucking everything that lives out of them.
As for Andy’s claim that “nothing brings you closer to understanding an animal and how it thinks and exists in its habitat than hunting it”, I wonder what David Attenborough, or Jane Goodall would make of such an argument.
Comment by paul fauvet — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
How utterly ridiculous. Entdinglichung has raised the very critical situation (which Tendance Coatesy has also covered) and Newman decides to write an article about banning cats, into which he throws the sort of blood and soil mysticism about rural areas and the countryside that only someone living in a large town could believe.
Lets be clear here:
- Hunting with dogs should be banned because the hunters deliberately set out to kill animals with methods sure to cause the dying animal an unnecessary amount of pain.
- Fishing should not be banned as the purpose is either to catch fish for food or to throw the fish back.
- People do not own cats with the deliberate intention of killing wildlife, with the exception of vermin.
There is obviously a case for regulation of fishing through licenses, to prevent overfishing in lakes and rivers, and for cats be neutered and the population controlled.
In addition, fishing is a popular pastime, unlike hunting, which betrays the class structure in rural areas. The toffs and upper middle classes are on the horses, the workers are those who look after the horses and dogs. The hunt tramples all over the fields of small farmers, who are powerless to do anything to stop this destruction by the ‘county set’. I’m glad its banned, as are a lot of people in largely rural areas.
Rather than talking about cats and descending into rural mysticism, maybe you could talk about the real issues in rural areas, like low pay and exploitation, extortionate and limited housing, and public service deserts. No one gives a shit about a load of stuck up twunts who can’t get pissed up and savage a fox anymore.
Comment by Jim Lowe — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:46 pm
Entdinglichung raised the critical situation in Guadaloupe, which I missed out in my previous post.
Comment by Jim Lowe — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:48 pm
Re: Hunting with dogs. This is all very interesting but I just have to step in here. A hound is a HOUND and should never be called anything else.
Comment by Annie Besant — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:48 pm
I’ll take your word for it Annie! I wouldn’t know because (whisper it quietly!), I have a cat…
Comment by Jim Lowe — 18 February, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
Jim, your NOrth Devon credibility must be a little tarnished when you write:
“Hunting with dogs should be banned because the hunters deliberately set out to kill animals with methods sure to cause the dying animal an unnecessary amount of pain.”
That may or not be true of hunting fox or stag to hounds. But can you please explain to me how hunting rabbits and hares with a sight hound, where the kill is instantaneous with a broken neck, causes an “unnecessary ammunt of pain.”
And in my original article I made exactly the same point as you:
You say: “The hunt tramples all over the fields of small farmers, who are powerless to do anything to stop this destruction by the ‘county set’. “
I said:; “Actually, there is also quite a bit of opposition specifically to fox hunting in rural areas, because the hunts are often bad neighbours, who spook other people’s livestock, leave gates open, and are typically snobby”
So why you think you can use that as a stick to beat me mystifies me a bit
Fox hunting is unpopular in rural areas, I agree. But can you explain how you can extrapolate a common principle from fox hunting being a toff’s sport to also criminalise hunting with a lurcher or whippet, or putting a terrier down a rabbit hole? that are also hunting for food.
Amd why not ban Polo and the Henley regatta, that would really put the class war into criminal law.
You distinctions betwen fishing and hunting with dogs are just silly. You totaly concede my point that the ban is realy about social conformity when you base your defence of fishing on the fact it is popular! And much hunting with dogs is also for food.
A lot of you don’t seem to have got this. The law doesn’t just ban fox and stag hunts, it bans ALL hunting with dogs.
Incidently, I have written before about the real issues in the countryside: http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=390
i love this argument that unless I talk about every issue in every article, then I am not interested in the other issues.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
Incidently, worth pointing out that between four million and five million people hunt in the UK.
when you casually talk about only a handful of toffs being interested.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:09 pm
#90
For keys, maybe
Comment by paulv — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
#90 Andy, well you’ve obviously got too much time on your hands at the minute so make that statistic stand up.
Cite the data source and what the definition of ‘hunt’ is.
Comment by Eddie Truman — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:21 pm
So Andy are we going to have cat hunts? Will this involve dressing up in red coats and ritually tearing them apart for conservation reasons?
More seriously I will try and post some more stuff here on ecology…fish are on the way out, more on this in the Economist than from left bloggers which is a bit of a shame.
Comment by Derek Wall — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
Yes Andy, I’ll no longer be able to walk the streets of Barnstaple without people pointing and laughing, and elderly women hurling insults at me, now my ‘North Devon credibility’ (whatever the hell that is) is ‘tarnished’. Btw I was referring to fox hunting anyway.
I’m not going to address the other points you’ve made now because I’m off out with my cat to kill some wildlife, but I’ll finish for now by thanking you for covering ‘real issues in the countryside’ with a few paragraphs contained in an article mainly about hunting published two and a half years ago. You’ve clearly got your finger on the pulse…
Comment by Jim Lowe — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:22 pm
Andy - I always thought hunting rabbits is exempt from the 2004 law. Going for the hare with the hound is what is illegal, which is a pity, as hare meat is better than rabbit meat. Although I think my lurcher is an anarchist anyway!
Comment by Barry Kade — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
Derek, count me in if you’re organising a cat or (preferably) dog hunt. I’m not really a morning person and I especially dislike cold mornings, so any summer afternoon will be just dandy with me. An American friend of mine owns three machine guns (he lived in California), I’ll ask him to lend me one for our afternoon of sport.
Presumably, America must see our anti-hunting obsession as a bizarre sickness. Hunting is just considered a national pastime, like baseball. What’s the situation like in other English-speaking countries? I get the impression that this is an England-only obsession, and a middle class one at that.
By the way, I got caught up in that huge “Coutryside Alliance” demo a few years back. On the train, I heard our tweed wearing friends retelling their terrible ordeal at the hands of the police: apparently, the police charged and beat up a number of them. One elderly upperclass woman said that she had never believed antiwar demonstrators when they said the police went wild without provocation. But she had learnt her lesson!
Comment by Tawfiq Chahboune — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:57 pm
Jim, your NOrth Devon credibility must be a little tarnished
Wait, is this article, and the comments thread, just a long wind-up from Andy?
If not, I’d recommend reading ‘The Rich at Play’ on this subject:
http://www.red-star-research.org.uk/rpm/rap/rap1.html
Comment by Duncan — 18 February, 2009 @ 6:59 pm
I said this to my cat:
“I am at one with the me, and in touch with the me, who is on this adventure.” (These words, or something like them, are used by the psychiatrist of a professional hitman in the film “Grosse Pointe Blank” to try and discourage him from “working”.)
The cat looked at me and walked off. It is too early to say if it has discovered reverence for life…
Comment by Faust — 18 February, 2009 @ 7:03 pm
58 above, yeah, get your point, am prepared to go with you on that as someone who worked as a bouncer in pubs and clubs for 6 years.
Don’t get Andy’s point tho’, have to say, just can’t see it, don’t get the attraction of fox hunting, the horsemanship maybe, but the dogs mangling the fox, sorry, lost on me.
When I was 16 I got dragged out on a grouse shoot once as a beater, in the North Yorkshire Moors, hated it, was just totally uncomfortable with scaring birds so they could be shot down by shooters. Saw at the end of the day that one of the shooters concerned was Willie Whitelaw (remember him ?), didn’t make me feel any better about it.
Get the nature thing, it can be pretty cruel, but don’t see any need to participate willingly in the cruelty, still less get enjoyment from it, just doesn’t feel right, would rather say no. Understand the argument about hypocrisy, when it comes to factory farming and other issues, don’t like them either, but don’t see hypocrisy as a reason for reveling in cruelty and totally one sided contests.
So, have to confess, fox hunting is lost on me, have never done it, maybe I should so as to know what I am talking about. So is this a lifestyle choice ? And is banning it somehow wrong ?
Strange argument for a socialist to make, isn’t the whole idea to shape society around what you value ? If just anything goes, let everybody do their own thing, seems like a neo-liberal argument to me.
Have obviously missed something here, have to confess I have no idea about what I am talking about, and am happy to keep it that way.
Comment by Anon — 18 February, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
#90 Does that figure include this lot getting touch with their rural roots?
“Dog kills roe deer in city park
Police are attempting to trace the owner of a dog which killed a young roe deer in a Glasgow park.
The dog, believed to be a Pointer, mauled the deer after chasing it around a section of Hogganfield Park at about 1600 GMT on Monday.
The deer is said to have sustained “horrific injuries” during the attack.
Last year, the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals said a “growing bloodlust” among teenage gangs had led to more attacks on urban deer.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7897114.stm
This morally the same as having a cat Andy?
Comment by DuncanB — 18 February, 2009 @ 7:49 pm
So, Andy wrote in the initial post:
“I keep whippets, and nowadays to take them rabbiting is actually against the law!”
1)Rabbits? Illegal? This is untrue. A dog going for rabbits is not against the law!
See: http://www.defra.gov.uk/rural/hunting/hunting_qa_a.htm
So Andy - bit of a gaff for someone pretending to be all rural and knowledgeable about working with dogs and slagging off the ‘townies’ for ‘enforcing social conformity of urban sentimentality onto country dwellers’!
2)Whippets? After a boyhood of keeping whippets and greyhounds - I think these animals are too highly strung and nervous. Bred for sportsmen or showing - not real hunting! Get yerself a good lurcher! Good mix of working dog and longdog. Mines got terrier, collie, greyhound and probably dragon in it! Marvellous creature in the woods and fields!
Comment by Barry Kade — 18 February, 2009 @ 8:06 pm
#100 I stand corrected Barry - I was misinformed by relying on pub talk for my legal advice.
I am pleased personaly, for obvious reaosns, but it does make the law even more of an ass.
Actually i nenver pretended to be an authority on anything, I just have a lot of opinions. Unfortunately, since the blog started getting a lot of reasders, some people seem to get over-excited about what my opinions are.
:o)
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:07 pm
#100
I am sure it is very regreatable that a deer in a park has sustained horrific injuries.
BUt apart from being bigger, can you explain why a deer is different from the millions of small mammals that sustain horrific injuries from cats?
From the point of view of the prey, every little difference i suspect.
This is clearly very delinquent, and illegal behaviour. It woudl have been illegal without the recent ban on hunting with dogs.
Comment by Andy Newman — 18 February, 2009 @ 9:10 pm
Is the cat saying, “Are you looking at me?”
Comment by Stockwell Pete — 18 February, 2009 @ 10:03 pm
Andy # 102: “I was misinformed by relying on pub talk for my legal advice.” You can learn a lot from blokes in pubs. I have been told that immigrants come over here, they get £5000 each, they go straight to the top of the housing queue, they get all the benefits going, then they get paid to go home so they can come back and do it all again! It’s political correctness gone mad, that’s what it is, you couldn’t make it up!
But before I go public with this information, I think I might check it first.
Comment by Francis King — 19 February, 2009 @ 12:36 am
yeah, yeah, it’s a fair cop.
But a bizarre legal distinction between hunting hares (illegal) and hunting rabbits (legal) itself shows the confusion of the law; and indeed further reinforces my point that the law against hunting is bugger all to do with animal welfare, and quite a lot to do with social disapproval of activities because we don’t like the people who do them.
For my money, that way lies tyranny.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 February, 2009 @ 12:44 am
For goodness sake what a loud of rubbish.
Andy, firstly it is not against the law to hunt with a dog for rabbits or to use a terrier underground or to shoot certain animals and birds. Hunting as you put it in Britain is NOT banned this is an untruth what is banned is cruel sports. The whole premise of your argument is bogus!
And secondly, the nonsense about cats is almost ridiculous, in fact its bloody stupid, cats are cats they do it on their own back and they are carniverous hunters. Hunting with hounds is not the dogs behaving on their own but for humans and for humans thrill. The hounds aren’t even allowed out by themselves like cats are.
And thirdly, on factory farming I wish they would ban it - it is wrong and nasty. There is no need to keep animals in such torturous situations and circumstances, as a meat eater I know that I am eating an animal that was killed for me to consume it, I do not lament its life but I do lament the horrors it may have lived, I try my best to limit my meat consumption and to buy freedom meat. But I am all for a ban on factory farming
Fourthly, there is nothing wrong with hunting in my opinion if you are willing to eat your catch! I don’t understand why rabbit is not a mainstake in our diets. And I bet the toffs who blood their young would never eat a fox!
And fifthly, you shouldn’t mess with cats!
Comment by Cat — 19 February, 2009 @ 12:45 am
Andy, why don’t you get down the Cowley plant and defend the Union you irrelevant little establishment toad. Take your whippet’s with their St George’s Cross bodywarmers, I’m sure that’ll go down a storm.
Comment by gobsmacked — 19 February, 2009 @ 1:04 am
#107
Cat
It simply isn’t true that the law is against “cruel sports”, having followed the DEFRA link that barry kindly gave. http://www.defra.gov.uk/rural/hunting/hunting_qa_a.htm
The law is against huting all wild mammals with dogs, except for some exceptions- which it seems are rats and rabbits.
Completely and specifically illegal is hare coursing. Now there may be arguments against hare coursing on the basis of population numbers but have been coursing (when it was legal) and it is absolutley no different from hunting a rabbit, excpet that the hare tends to run more straight and faster, and the rabbits tend to turn more sharply.
In particular, when the hound catches the hare the quarry is killed instantaneoulsy by a combination of the force of impact and a technique the dogs have instinctivley of breaking the hare’s neck by a sort of flick of the dog’s head. this is a quick, humane death.
Hare coursing is absolutey NOT any more cruel than rabbiting. One is illegal and the other is legal.
And yes cats do hunting on their own initiative (but so do dogs once you introduce them into the habitant where there are quarry animals), but it is human being who deliberatley introduce domestic cats into the habitat. So the argument is not about cats, but about cat-owners
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 February, 2009 @ 1:45 am
Opponents of blood sports don’t understand hunting, and don’t understand rural life.
This is the most utter madness I’ve ever read. I’m sorry but WTF. The ban on blood sports was a massive attack on the landed aristorcracy, it was an attack on a way of life: The aristorcratic, barbaric way of life that fox hunting symbolises. The whole blood on the faces of children thing - You have NO DISGUST at this whatsoever??
I admit banning something is not desiriable. But taking another living thing’s life is definetly ban-able as you’re are infringing something elses right to live, therefore you are not 100% entitled to it (as the consequences go beyond you as a legal being) and it can be banned.
But seriously WTF Andy you sound like such a raving Tory in this post - You are supposed to be a socialist - *bang head on brick wall* Also I am not a vegetarian, but surely those who argue in favour of it are truly to be of greater respect than those who defend meat eating?
Comment by Futurecast — 19 February, 2009 @ 3:03 am
I have to respond to Andy’s post at # 109 that there are no real differences between rabbiting and hare coursing! There are many key differences.
Now historically the main difference has been shaped by CLASS and the RURAL CLASS WAR, interestingly enough for us socialists!
But these class differences are also at play between formal coursing - the ’sport’ on the one hand, and both informal coursing and rabbiting on the other. Formal coursing is not for hunting for game, but is to show off the skill of a hound as a competition.
Now the class history is quite fascinating. As the informative ‘wikipedia’ entry on the subject tells us:
“Whether for sporting or hunting purposes, hare coursing was in the UK and Europe historically restricted to landowners and the nobility, who used sighthounds, the ownership of which was at certain historic times prohibited among the lower social classes”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_coursing
Now, where I live, on the edges of the forest of Bowland, this is particularly significant. Once upon a time if you were found with a greyhound or other sighthound within 10 miles of a ‘royal forest’, the officialdom of the bastard nobility (chief forester) would officially mutilate and cripple yer hound with a cut to its knees! And they would not be very nice you either!
So that’s why the rural working people and the poor had lurchers! And I have one now - a good one!
Lurchers are originally for poachers - and greyhounds, deerhounds etc are originally for the nobility. The greyhound is not much of a hunter - it is for chasing a hare straight down the middle of an open field - i.e. the sport of formal hare coursing.
But the Lurcher is clever, sneaky and discreet - they never bark and they always sneak around the edges of fields and woods, nearly invisible, and keeping a hidden but watchful distance from their human companion. At the same time they are continually and energetically hunting by both sight and scent. This cleverness may be part of the name as ‘Lurch’ is an old traveller (’gypsy’) word for ‘thief’! This independent and hidden mode of operation was crucial so as to not reveal the accompanying human poacher to the gamekeeper or other rural agents of the ruling classes. In hard times, having a good lurcher kept many poor rural communities from starving.
So game-rabbiting with a lurcher has a different history and dynamic to the competitive sport of formal hare coursing with greyhounds.
But neither rabbiting or hare coursing are painless for the quarry. The hound shaking the prey rarely breaks the neck cleanly, as Andy imagines. This is the conclusion of scientific studies - and my own experience. The stricken creatures often writhe around for a minute, while they die from internal injuries. Luckily, me lurcher is getting quite old now and she doesn’t catch so many these days! While rabbit was vital for peasants and rural workers, its not the most nutritious meat - very lean and short on certain amino acids. And of course they often look a bit myxy! Still - can be quite good with veg in the pot as part of a balanced diet!
Comment by Barry Kade — 19 February, 2009 @ 3:37 am
I agree with lenin at #7 and other posters who point to dubious and simplistic authentic rural/alienated urban dichotomies in Andy’s article. Yes capitalism creates a dichotomy but not absolutely. I for one had a mainly rural upbringing, worked a lot with horses, studied and lived for a while in the city, and now in a small regional centre. I love horses and cats, and think dogs are annoying and better as work animals than pets, and that hunting apart from pests or necessary food is highly stupid and cruel. I’d also confidently guess that many times more members of the rural proletariat here are involved in Save the Koala groups and the like than hunting.
Also you only have to look at the dried up rivers and eroding plains of Australia to know that many rural people have a flawed and ignoranr relationship to the environment, and that many “middle class urban greenies” have some better ideas in this regard (i.e. many hippie vegetarians who love fluffy native animals are very favourable to a switch from meat production from cows and sheep to potentially much less damaging and more sustainable production from native animals).
Andy also greatly simplifies the cat question. Jonica Newby, probably the leading expert in Australia of human-interaction, in her fascinating book about domestic animals (which she terms “our evolutionary partners”) Animal Attraction, concedes that predation by cats is a problem, but makes the following points: cats, like other pets, have proven therapeutic value, as well a useful role in controlling rats; they use much less resources than dogs and are much better suited to urban settings; in Australia, where the problem causes most angst, a large part of the issue is the existence of feral cats in the bush, who may have predated white colonisation, and so even the elimination of domestic cats wouldn’t solve anything; and owner education has greatly reduced the problem.
My well-fed and pampered cats generally couldn’t be arsed hunting. Each time I’ve moved they’ve first slaughtered the local rat population, and with their household responsibilities undertaken, then had a rest. In this regard I think domestic cats are quite sociable (In fact I swear the slaughtered rats have often been left in our room, limbs and skin carefully eaten but organs and head intact, in some kind of feline ritual offering).
We lived for two years surrounded by forest, a few hundred metres from a National Park. Initially the house was constantly surrounded by wildlife. Our then kitten used to wrestle with a poteroo (a small marsupial). However when our housemate got a dog, the native fauna scattered. When a couple of dogs moved to the adjacent property, a pack soon formed, and mauled koala and chicken corpses appeared in the neighbourhood.
So don’t dis my cats. They can be quite vicious, when they could be arsed.
Comment by Nick Fredman — 19 February, 2009 @ 3:40 am
Here in Australia the issue isn’t a much like that at all. If we leave aside the PETA style approach to creature ethics, the Australian landscape is peopled with feral animals that should be done away with: rabbits, goats, deer, buffalo,donkeys, pigs, and the like which cause massive damage to the local ecology. Killing these somehow is an ecological service. While rabbits eat anything and strip back the vegetation, the other creatures listed not only eat the landscape and displace native fauna but their cloved hooves break up Australian soils and foster massive erosion damage.
So any environment management program here has to include getting rid of feral exotic animals. In the case of foxes, feral cats and dogs (and cane toads) the interface is a bit more active and savage as these creatures slaughter native wild life to an extreme degree being in some instances why several smaller species of marsupials are on the edge of extinction or have died out.
In the case of the cane toad — which I in fact hunt in my own garden — they advance across the continent killing creatures who inadvertently assume they’re lunch. The toads are poisonous.
The local equivalent of the fox hunt debate here is the slaughter of kangaroos which many pastoralists accuse of destroying fences and eating pasture to the detriment of sheep and cattle. There is a developing view among a pragmatic sector of the environment movement that we should be farming kangaroos rather than ruminants as cattle and sheep emissions are the major contributor to green house gas levels from agriculture — second only to power generation as a source of Australian greenhouse gas share.
The complication is how to farm kangaroos as current meat harvesting is done by night time spotlighting with rifles and the blighters are not as obedient as sheep or cattle.
Other areas of hunting that are relevant to this discussion is crocodile shooting which is now banned.
However, Andy’s argument isn’t complicated by thoughts of the environment at all just a savage of tooth and claw approach.
In regard to cats — I’m dead against them and would neuter the lot of em because they have such an impact on the local fauna — even when they are domestic and don’t go feral. Cats if kept should be house bound or kept in cat runs. Otherwise I’d ban their ownership. The massive death toll is simply too heavy.
As for dogs — and I keep Jack Russells — dogs here are kept for hunting, usually wild pigs, and I don’t have a problem with that at all. Terriers like Jack Russells are kept by Councils to hunt rats and a range of dogs will be used in the duck season (another hot issue here esp in Victoria — duck shooting). Unfortunately people do not ‘hunt’ rabbits as much as I’d like and I’m not certain what is the preferred means today to kill or capture them. Dogs aren’t one of them.
But some folk can make a good living hunting dingoes for a bounty — as they do killing kangaroos for a levy price.
But domestic dogs per se do not have to hunt in the sense that Andy argues. While the many breeds of dog have been bred with various hunting functions in mind it doesn’t follow that after 200 or 300 or 500 years of pedigree-ing they have to be given live critters to hunt down and kill in the same sense that a snake does. I think thats’ an absurd notion.
You just have to compare the penchant to stalk and kill by your neighborhood moggy to the day to day preferences of the family dog to note a vast difference in instinctual lifestyle. If we want to fix each breed to the reasons they were bred in the first place then we’d need to bring back bear baiting and dog fighting just to service the rationale for their existence.
So while I’m saying that dogs don’t need to hunt to be dogs ,( at least from our POV and in a sense we created them) I’m also saying that some dogs should not be kept as domestic pets — and here it is pig dogs– who have a reputation for killing babies or young children and little old ladies. Here in Brisbane we have a system of registration and warning for declared dangerous dogs by dint of bread or canine history. And any bloke who keeps these dogs — and doesn’t use them for hunting and taht’s the majority of these dogs in ownership– surely has a penis issue I reckon.
My neighbor is a hunter — he travels the world killing big game. That’s his life outside work hours. And his front room is full of stuffed heads.I have a problem with that but I know where he’s coming from. I do not, however, consider it an essential visceral element in everyone’s existence that they should hunt. I think thats’ a very unMarxian concept in terms of everything Marx said about humans and nature as the relationship changed and evolved. It’s what the “Deer Hunters for Jesus” types would argue to justify the American right wing libertarianism ( a la Joe Bageant telling of it).
What Andy is doing is projecting this notion onto his pets and suggesting that he can live vicariously through their hunting and killing. OK Fine — but don’t bring it to a discussion of Marxism or Socialism because it is a proclivity that is, in effect, unnecessary either for the dogs — whippets — or for the rest of us humans in terms of the world we need to live in.
Andy also panders absolutely to the the PETA argument that domestic pets are wild creatures in house slippers and the logic would then be that animals should not be kept as pets as that is in itself a unethical imposition. I disagree with that strongly especially on the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species — as while dogs have evolved with human assistance to share many attributes we value (as have cattle and sheep and pigs etc) Darwin is similarly triumphant in the fact that cats have not and remain still prone to savage claw.
Comment by Dave Riley — 19 February, 2009 @ 4:52 am
Andy, on the issue of fox hunting, doesn’t it instil cruelty?
Comment by Louise — 19 February, 2009 @ 9:53 am
Absolutely not
Fox hunting isn’t cruel.
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 February, 2009 @ 9:58 am
#115
Well, that’s where we totally disagree. I believe you are instilling cruelty in people along with a cruel mindset.
Comment by harpymarx — 19 February, 2009 @ 10:30 am
Townie
:o)
Comment by Andy Newman — 19 February, 2009 @ 10:41 am
# 113 Dave you clearly taking a dog chauvinist rather than a scientific approach in calling to ban cats. There are plenty of feral dogs slaughtering the wildlife in Oz, and as I indicated at 112 I’ve witnessed domestic dogs do the same in the still recovering ecosystem around Nightcap National Park.
Not to mention witnessing one of my mother’s ridiculous datschunds break the necks of a dozen friend’s guinea pigs in a few seconds (a well-fed dog in no way encouraged to hunt, like those mentioned above) a feat no doubt replicated numerous times on whatever native furries also looked a bit like whatever hapless animal the little yappers are breed to kill.
As Newby stresses in Animal Attraction, domestic animals, including dogs and cats, have evolved with human culture and are intertwined with it. A war on cats would be just as useless and diversionary as the war on drugs. And as with maximising the benefits and minimising the dangers of drugs, non-judgemental education and help with harm minimisation, rather than punative moralism, are the key aspects of sound public policy towards pet ownership.
Comment by Nick Fredman — 19 February, 2009 @ 10:52 am
#104 (If nobody got in before me) Surely more like “Are you looking at my bird?”
Comment by albacore — 19 February, 2009 @ 11:11 am
I should explain that I am a dog person. If I was to say anything even remotely nice about cats I would feel disloyal to a long deceased canine friend who had really rather strong views on the subject.
Comment by johng — 19 February, 2009 @ 11:28 am
Re 120 - a strange binarism is that: dog people and cat people! Perhaps this reveals the arbitrary nature of all such binarisms:
Dog / Cat; Black / white; Male / Female. etc.
As if there were only two kinds of small furry mammals, two human skin colours or two genders to choose from!
I wonder why our conceptual system does this?
Comment by Barry Kade — 19 February, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
re 121: …capitalism/socialism, bosses/workers, them/us. Rejection of binarism raises some very fundamental problems of socialist ideology…
Comment by Francis King — 19 February, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
Barry, because to my dog it was an absolutely central question. In other words this binary system does not come from US. It comes from THEM. Perhaps because these are the two kinds of creatures whose relationship with us goes the furthest and the deepest into our history. Some people think cats are more independent then dogs. So are flies.
Comment by johng — 19 February, 2009 @ 1:39 pm
you keep whippets!
Comment by mark anthony france — 19 February, 2009 @ 8:47 pm
If Sam the Skull could read this he would not be pleased.
Check out Sam the Skull here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAu5vkeDTk&feature=related
(Sam the Skull is a famous Glasgow Cat)
Comment by Cat — 19 February, 2009 @ 9:52 pm
Let us not forget that cat who can tell when terminal patients in hospital are about to join the Choir Invisible.
I am surprised that the authorities have never invited that cat to an interview downtown, just to eliminate him (I think it is a him?) as a suspect. “All right, Puss. You might as well confess now and save us a lot of trouble.”
Comment by Faust — 20 February, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
“You’re having a rest, saving strength for the telly
When the kitten of death makes a nest on your belly.
The doctors pay court to the ultimate juror
Another result for the whiskered grim purrer.
But this addled wrinkly’s not giving up yet
To hell with the doctors - she calls in the vet.
Our murdering moggy has sensed the death sniff
But this time our Oscar has picked the wrong stiff….”
Comment by Faust — 21 February, 2009 @ 12:19 am
i think your all missing the point of hunting its to survive and eat your catch … plus as of cats it has been nown for them to catch for food and entertainment they have a simple yet cunning mind and also very straight foward mind
Comment by craig — 1 May, 2009 @ 1:39 am
I think you are completelly stupid, cats are hunters and they must hunt anything to eat. If you are acting against the nature is a big fault. Leave them alone, if you are not understand that it’s your problem cause you are a just stupid human…
Comment by Alekos — 25 July, 2009 @ 10:42 pm
the reason YOU don’t like cats, is because they have a mind of their own, and are not dictated too or manipulated by man like STUPID dogs are. At least when a cat kills it’s done skillfully and by itself, it DOESN’T NEED the intervention of man for this purpose. Dogs kill in packs they surround an animal before tearing it to pieces they are therefore cowards, giving the prey no chance of escape. The domestic cat does what their wild cousins have always done. You can train a dog to humans’ command, not a cat, and that is the fact of what you don’t like. Also dogs sniff other dog excrement, which is as disgusting as it gets, cats are clean, are brilliant mouse catchers, where there’s mice there’s rats. Oh and were worshipped as gods in Egypt need I say more.
Comment by mel — 7 August, 2009 @ 3:26 pm
I am searching for images (like the above) of birds mauled by cat - stills or video.
CAn I use this one? Where is it from - and does anybody have any others??
Help.
This is for a Canadian documentary on feral cat colonies across North America.
ybrend@telus.net
Comment by Yvette Brend — 19 May, 2010 @ 7:26 pm