25 May, 2001

John Sheard ponders on the ever-increasing politicisation of one of Britain's favourite charities.

APPARENTLY, Prince Charles is very cross with the RSPCA - Patron: HM the Queen - because the charity only coughed up a measly £2,000 to the fund the Prince has set up to help farmers hit by foot and mouth disease.

At the same time, the venerable charity is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on large scale newspaper advertising in its campaign to have fox hunting banned - a move which, according to RSPCA Communication Director John Rolls, will drag Britain out of the Dark Ages.

In other words, hundreds of thousands of country folk who get pleasure or their livelihoods - or both - are benighted savages who need a politically correct saviour to show them the light of true civilisation as seen from Horsham, the Home Counties suburb where the RSPCA is based.

Now this is not only insulting but also it is, in my opinion, highly dangerous for the future of Britain's best-known charity. When charities become involved in politics, they are bound to upset a lot of people. And although I hate to admit it, I stopped contributing to RSPCA collections some five years ago over this very issue.

Let me make a few things absolutely clear. One, I have a deep affection for animals. My family over the years kept a pony, numerous dogs and cats and a rabbit. I have the vets' bills to prove it.

Secondly, I have never hunted in my life although I do fish for trout and salmon - with a fly, like a gentleman. Should hunting go, angling will be the next target for PC townies for there have already been several serious cases of extreme violence against fishermen by hunt saboteurs.

But thirdly, and perhaps the most important, I have studied hunting on and off for some 40 years and seem to know something which has escaped the RSPCA: it is the best-known method for managing the fox population.

Sounds daft? In that case, look at an area of England where foxhunting died out completely for agricultural reasons: East Anglia, where prairie farmers quite naturally did not want hunts ploughing through their huge fields of cereal crops.

The result: with the huntsmen gone, the fox has been shot or poisoned almost out of existence so that it is now virtually an endangered species. And the rabbit population has soared in the absence of its main predator (now that man has stopped eating it, that is).

Now I am not saying that fox hunting is good for foxes. I have no doubt that they are terrified when being chase by hounds and sometimes they are killed by the dogs before the huntsman has time to get there to deliver the coup de grace.

But that is quicker than dying of wounds after a bad shot has failed to kill them. Or a lingering death from poison. And we should also remember that the fox hands out more than its fair share of terror to its victims - ask anyone whose hen house has been raided and dozens of birds killed, not for food, but out of blood lust.

All this is, of course, highly emotive stuff. Townies whose views of foxes have been fashioned by their cute images on TV nature programmes have been brain-washed into thinking of the fox as a fluffy, cuddly pet rather than the ferocious killer it really is.

Sadly, it is townies who now run the RSPCA. The old landowning class that once dominated such charities - and which had a deep understanding of country life as it really is - have been replaced by trendy media types who, as likely as not, think that understand rural affairs because they have an expensive weekend cottage within easy driving distance of London.

So here is my main criticism: I strongly object to the freedoms of rural folk being trampled on by politically correct urbanites. I object even more strongly that these people have no idea whatsoever what they are talking about.

That is why I have crossed the RSPCA off the list of charities I support. And, I'll wager, there will be many thousands more like me after this campaign is over. To use an apt blood-sporting analogy, the RSPCA has shot itself in the foot.

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Comments

I agree with what you are saying. I fox hunt myself and it is way better than shooting foxes it is also a good sport.

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How anyone can consider it appropriate to restart hunting after the FMD debacle is incredible. There has been no research into whether the activities of the hunt helped spread the disease before it was notified. We should all learn lessons from the past and prevent the risk in future. The time is now right, both logically amd morally to cease this arcane practice. No, I'm not a 'PC Townie' or saboteur, my heritage is totally rural Yorkshire. It has long been my own experience that more 'new money' townies who have moved out to the country support hunting than ordinary rural folk. Research and opinion polls seems to back this up. I would also like to offer people an analogy. If I decided to set my own dog on a stray on my farm and encourage it to rip the stray animal to pieces, I would quite rightly get arrested and be convicted of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal. If I tried to claim it was in the name of sport, I would be laughed out of court. To claim there is any difference would be an insult to the intelligence of any educated person.

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