Two descriptions today of the Tedworth Hunt. One is in the article by Robert McCrum in The Observer and the other given to me by a sab who sabbed them yesterday. Using a day out with Tedworth as his platform McCrum vaunts in colourful detail the pleasures of hunting which include apparently spontaneous sex in trailers stimulated by this high risk (to the fox) recreation. Unpleasantly, this reminds me of the rapes carried out by pillaging soldiers high on violence. In fact this long and profoundly sickening description has poisoned my day. Perhaps it is the well-prosed renditions of the beauties of the landscape and of nature juxtaposed with sex and violence all in the wonderful and magical early morning light. I can’t get it out of my mind today, and today is a beautiful day that should make you forget all but its beauty. That is the infection of the hunting horror. It gives you pictures you cannot erase. McCrum says he is in an Alice in Wonderland world because he is out hunting but the fox is never mentioned.Too right. He says they admit they are cubhunting but are ‘evasive’ about what they are actually doing.The picture of these people carefuly making word play the distinction between right and wrong is deeply unerving.
Compare this well-written and articulate prose, written by an ex-public school Cambridge graduate son of an old Etonian, with the description of the sab of his day out with the same hunt. He is pleased because by getting up at an ungodly hour, travelling miles following the hunt from the kennels, the sabs managed to prevent hunting being carried out. The hunt proceeded to put the young hounds in many covers and along hedges to find foxes and the hounds went on cry twice, meaning they had found a fox, but as these brave hunterfolk are not brave enough to ‘do it’ in front of witnesses, the hunt kept moving on and eventually went home early. In the course of their activities, as the sab observed, they disturbed many forms of wildlife, including hares and roe deer that fled the hunt in terror, and birds disrupted from the hedgerows.