Fox hunting ban passed amid violent clashes (UK)

Supporters of fox hunting stormed Britain's parliament Wednesday and clashed with police in the streets, but failed to stop lawmakers from voting by an overwhelming margin to ban the blood sport.

Debate was suspended for 30 minutes after five pro-hunt protesters, in the first incident of its kind in modern times, burst into the House of Commons chamber -- the second dramatic security breach in London in three days.

"Clearly the intrusion was a carefully planned operation," said Commons speaker Michael Martin, adding that parliament was asking police to carry out a full investigation.

The five, wearing T-shirts depicting Prime Minister Tony Blair with devil's horns, were arrested -- while outside, riot police with batons and tear gas kept back 10,000 furious pro-hunt demonstrators hurling bottles and fireworks.

At least 19 people were injured in the melee, including a police officer, while a total of seven people were arrested, the Metropolitan Police said.

In a late-night statement, police said the five intruders, plus three others who failed to enter the Commons chamber, all aged 21 to 42, had been charged with violent disorder, burglary with intent to commit criminal damage, and "suspicion of uttering a forged instrument."

Despite the protests and after an afternoon of debate, MPs voted 356 to 166 in favor of legislation to ban fox hunting with dogs in England and Wales. The blood sport has been banned in Scotland since 2002.

They then went on to vote 342-15 for the ban to take effect in July 2006, enabling countryside dwellers whose livelihoods depend on fox hunting to find other means to make a living.

The legislation goes Thursday to the House of Lords, which has stalled previous attempts at banning fox hunting.

This time around, however, Blair's government has pledged to use special laws to overrule the unelected upper house to put the ban in place after years of controversy. But Wednesday was certain to be remembered as the first time that "strangers," to use a quaint parliamentary phrase, have invaded the Commons floor in modern times, and possibly since Charles I invaded parliament in 1642.

It occurred four months after Blair was hit by a condom full of purple-colored flour thrown from the public gallery, and two days after a protester dressed as Batman climbed onto a ledge at the front of Buckingham Palace, the official residence of Queen Elizabeth II.

Both stunts were the work of a fathers' rights group, but observers inevitably wondered what could have happened if hardened terrorists had been the perpetrators.

One of the five protesters was Otis Ferry, 21, Britain's youngest hunt master, news media reported. Ferry is the son of rock crooner Bryan Ferry, of the 1970s band Roxy Music.

Another, Luke Tomlinson, 27, is an Eton-educated top polo player and long-standing friend of Prince William and Prince Harry, the Daily Telegraph newspaper reported.

Martin, the Commons speaker, said a total of eight men gained access from parliament's main public entrance, St Stephen's Gate, using a forged letter inviting them to a meeting in a committee corridor.

Once inside, they were led to a stairway, "probably" by someone with a parliamentary pass, whipped off their jackets, then rushed doorkeepers who managed to stop only three of them.

Banning fox hunting has been simmering since the Labour Party took power in 1997, and came to a boil in September last year when more than 400,000 hunt supporters bore down on London for an unprecedented march.

Supporters insist the practice is an inalienable right in rural Britain, unappreciated by city dwellers, and a rural tradition which helps control countryside pests and provides thousands of jobs.

Opponents say it is both elitist and barbaric, with a pack of dogs tracking a live animal and then tearing it apart. Opinion polls suggest that a majority of Britons favor a ban.

The Commons has overwhelmingly adopted legislation to ban fox hunting before, most recently in June 2003, only to see it blocked in the Lords, which has deep roots in the land-owning aristocracy.

I live in the country, and compassion for animals is not liberal emotionalism at all.

I agree with you. Being compassionate is a good thing and is not the same as hysteria or liberal emotionalism. But insisting that the numbers of a destructive pest only be reduced in ways that you happen to like, such as shooting with guns, is not being compassionate. It bespeaks ignorance. We have told you time and again that the evidence is quite clear that shooting a fox with rifles or shotguns has been shown not to be successful but to cause much greater suffering to these animals. Driving foxes out of their dens to be cornered and gut-shot by people with shotguns is not sporting and doesn't even let the healthy foxes live. Are you not compassionate enough to care about that? Or will you, like a liberal, disregard the documentation and continue to insist on your own view in defiance of the facts?

I don't believe fox "hunters" don't enjoy harming these animals, or they wouldn't do it. Somehow I don't get a picture of grim faces equivalent to a person who has to put their dog down.

So is it now only okay to control the predator population if you're miserable while you do it?

Hunters enjoy riding their horses 'cross country, they love studying hound work, and they love observing the complex chess game between hounds and the fox, who so often seems smarter than the hounds. Quite often they cheer when a brave or smart fox gets away. They are not personally acquainted with the hunted fox so of course they don't feel the same way they would if a beloved hound had to be put down. But neither do they take an unseemly pleasure in the death of a vermin animal that will eat their lambs alive even while the lamb is in the middle of the birth process.

Sorry, but in light of the official studies done, showing that hunting doesn't reduce the population or reduce the risk of predation, I have a hard time accepting this. I also have a hard time viewing a beneficial animal who kills farmer's "pests" as a pests themselves. In light of my bible study, I also have a hard time believing the Lord accepts this. You might want to look up passages in the bible (not just the one that says you have dominion) and ask yourself how Jesus and the Lord felt about animals. Animals do have souls and do go to heaven. Yes, we can eat them, just as lions can eat straw, but that will change. This is all I have to say on the subject, since it's as tattered as a fox after the hunt. But if you'd like, I can post the many bible passages that indicate the Lord does love them and that you, despite being in the image of God, have the same fate as the animals awaiting you after life.

To understand hunting, please read Meditations on Hunting. Among other core and oft misunderstood issues, the author discusses "photo safaris" and other "no-kill hunts", and explains very well why that just doesn't work for the human psyche. To excerpt a key section:

One does not hunt in order to kill;
on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.
If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.
In all of this, the moral problem of hunting has not been resolved. We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable. Therefore it is necessary to oppose photographic hunting, which is not progress but rather a digression and a prudery of hideous moral style.
Every authentic refinement must leave intact the authenticity of the hunt, its essential structure, which is a matter of a confrontation between two unequal species. The real care that man must exercise is not in pretending to make the beast equal to him, because that is a stupid utopian, beatific farce, but rather in avoiding more and more the excess of his superiority. Hunting is the free play of an inferior species in the face of a superior species. That is where one must make some refinement. Man must give the animal a "handicap," in order to place him as close as possible to his own level. The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal.
I have said "religious," and the word does not seem excessive to me. A fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the universal fact of hunting: the inexorable hierarchy among living beings. Every animal is in a relationship of superiority or inferiority with regard to every other. Strict equality is exceedingly improbable and anomalous.
Life is a terrible conflict, a grandiose and atrocious confluence. Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of nature.
- Jose Ortega Y Gasset

I wouldn't waste my time or money on that book. I grew up in a family of hunters, and was taught it is unethical to hunt unless it is for food. That is my philosophy. I live in the "big outdoors" and am an avid fisher. For food. We do have wildlife problems up here, of which 99% can be solved humanely. I guess my mentality is one which I see myself as a part of nature, rather than a cruel lord over it. I don't take pleasure in "rack size" but at the same time have no problem enjoying venison burgers. Too many hunters up here have no respect for nature. They view other predators (who have to kill for food) as competitition for "their" deer. I think it is shortsighted and terribly ignorant. Can they or can't they just look at a bear or a beautiful buck without wanting to end its life?

Well, if anecdotal evidence is O.K. with you, how do you explain to the farmers who lost the 70 lambs when the hunt was discontinued that the hunt didn't "reduce the risk of predation"? And what about the Burns Report, which says the exact opposite?

Don't want to get into a lengthy theological argument, but since hunting of predators and protection of the flocks from wolves is featured in the Bible (e.g. in the parable of the hireling shepherd), I don't think that will wash.

Animals do not share the destiny of humans because they never participated in Original Sin. They have souls, but not immortal souls. But that does not seem to me necessarily to exclude the possibility (suggested by C.S. Lewis) that humans have the power to ennoble animals.

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