Written Evidence of ... for wildness’ sake^© – Second Stage

Population management and control

Since, as of lunchtime yesterday, the transcript of proceedings of the Seminar held at Church House, Dean’s Yard, Westminster on Wednesday April 19^th 2000was not available, ... for wildness’ sake^© (FWS) was unable to provide references except from notes taken by the writer at the time.

Observations

In directing one of the participants, Lord Burns observed that "urban foxes are not part of my remit".

In the opinion of FWS, foxes may be termed "urban" whenever and wherever they display urban habits.

Such habits are inculcated by adaptation induced by the lure of Man’s litter-loutish habits, or, as one might say, by adoption, where "adoption" is via deliberate feeding or, indeed, as anecdotally (but scarcely improbably) is happening with quickening frequency, by a mixture of both.

Rural foxes and their urban counterparts can and, therefore, do breed successfully. This is obviously inevitable, given that neither "tendency" can be ring-fenced. Moreover, the process is numerically augmented, at varying ranges, by periodic, misguided if often well-intentioned, deportations from town to country.

"So they can realise their full potential in wild places" (so wrote Byron Rogers, Sunday Telegraph, July 7^th 1997 (please refer to FWS’s primary evidence facing page 5)) 6% bussed out per annum

According to the writer’s note of a figure given by Prof. Steve Harris of the Biosciences Dept., University of Bristol, such bussing accounts for an intriguingly precise figure of 6% of the urban population of that city per annum. It was not clear, to the writer at any rate, as to whether Prof. Harris condoned this activity but no outright disapproval was detected.

In the context of the political issue that underlay the establishment of the Committee and determined its terms of reference, namely that its was instructed "to inquire into the practical aspects of different types of hunting with dogs and its impact on ... the management and conservation of wildlife ... (and) the consequences for these issues of any ban on hunting with dogs ...", FWS believes that to exclude urban foxes from the Committee’s remit would, at best, relegate evidence of species degradation to the opacity of the merely implicit and, at worst, obscure it altogether.

Too narrow an interpretation?

FWS questions, therefore, whether the Committee should interpret its remit so narrowly and, indeed, taking what FWS regards as the paramount interest of the Red Fox, as a species, into account, inappropriately.

FWS has addressed the issue of fox deportation in 1. above.

Conveniently for hunting’s opponents, though surprisingly given the regularly transmitted visual evidence from one tragic theatre of human conflict or another of shooting’s inability to guarantee instant, agony-free despatch, public opinion is routinely recorded by pollsters as confirming, by ²/₃rds to 75%, its belief that shooting is either humane in itself or, at any rate, the most humane form of fox control.

Although the writer recalls Prof. Harris referring to shooting as his preferred method of control, or phrases or words to that effect, he does not recall his commenting on its humaneness in either absolute or relative terms.

Suffice to say that the anti-hunting cause is obviously aided by a public belief that the worst that the fox can face in the event that hunting were to be criminalised is what it believes to be the humane alternative of shooting, i.e. an alternative that not only offers the perception of instant despatch but delivers it as an absolute.

Unlike wounded dogs which whimper, wounded foxes suffer in silence

In a Radio 4 interview following MAFF’s press release of mid-March of its summary of evidence to the Committee which, inter alia, pointed to shooting’s greater efficiency than hunting in terms of numbers of foxes killed, a representative of the Campaign for the Protection of Hunted Animals (CPHA) dismissed the interviewer’s challenge, which was along the line, "was not shooting rather shooting at?" by referring to "the small proportion of injured foxes that are suffering from gunshot wounds as recorded by the RSPCA".

Passing over what percentage is "small" and whether that percentage would, if publicly known, still be acceptable either to the CPHA, the RSPCA or, indeed, the general public itself, what was exposed was not her mastery but her ignorance of the Red Fox’s behaviour.

A wounded fox that is still mobile will not show itself to passers-by in the hope that it will be taken into Casualty. Instinctively, it makes for the nearest cover and lies motionless with the intention of evading detection.

Moreover, unlike wounded dogs which whimper, especially if they sense the prospect of attracting attention, wounded foxes instinctively suffer in silence making their casual discovery improbable.

The RSPCA’s purported statistical findings are, thus, unsurprising.

Fox dispersal and natural population control

It is often said that hunting is an inefficient means of fox control. Numbers are then produced in support of alternatives with particular emphasis on shooting at as the favoured, hence recommended, alternative.

This rigidly numerical approach to determining efficiency ignores hunting’s important, practicably irreplaceable, though obviously unquantifiable, role in population control.

On being pushed out of the territory of their birth, young foxes, notably young dog foxes, may be obliged to travel significant distances before finding a power vacuum, so to speak, in which to try to establish a viable territory of their own.

This is a natural process which is fundamental to ensuring sufficient genetic diversity to sustain the vigour and wildness of the species by minimising the risk of inbreeding and its invariably debilitating consequences. Herein lies the rub.

The fox’s habitat in most of England and Wales ceased long since to be a natural one and the fox is nothing if not adaptable ... to the easier life offered by Man’s pastoral processes (including poultry), his insecure and litter-loutish approach to edible refuse disposal and his usually well-meaning, rapidly proliferating and wholly misguided fast food service.

The closer the fox gets to and the more experience that it gets of "the easier life" the weaker the motivation to evict young dog foxes from the territory of their birth. This, in turn, leads to a correspondingly reduced need for them to travel very far to find and establish one of their own. In areas where McTitbit has branches in every street, and sometimes, it seems, sub-branches in every house, that distance may be negligible. Meanwhile, the size of a self-sufficient territory is also falling.

Apart from direct intervention in the distribution of foxes for the purpose of promoting genetic diversity – and it is easy to imagine the bureaucratic absurdity into which that would develop "date-based vulpine passports and video collars in acc. with EU Reg 2345/99" - hunting is the only agency, faintly approaching the natural, which can induce foreboding of an intensity that would encourage the fox rather to keep its distance from human activity.

In so reacting, the fox becomes automatically in need of a larger territory or, at any rate, a different one. "Huntin’ keep ‘em movin’" is the way livestock farmers have often put it to the writer. By supporting and stimulating the process of dispersal, hunting makes an irreplaceable contribution to discouraging the behavioural mutation of the Red Fox to stray dog living rough.

100% efficiency

In these days of increasing concern with animal welfare and welcome promotion of agricultural de-intensification, the only measure of efficiency which, in the opinion of FWS, should feature in the argument is in respect of the efficiency of despatch – 100% in the case of hunting. FWS harbours the uncharitable thought that it may suit some of hunting’s opponents deliberately to overlook and/or obscure this reality by concentrating attention on the relative number of despatches, whose number confirm "No contest!"

Only a small minority of citizens involve themselves in live target shooting, either in the form of pest control or pastime. Only that modest number, therefore, has personal experience and awareness of, if perhaps less sensitivity to, the inevitability that a proportion of such targets will be agonisingly wounded with the threat that this will be prolonged.

Shoot = dead is far from being an absolute

Many shooters are, in truth, no more than casual pot-shotters, while a shotgun’s discharge is designed to meet the need for shot to be scattered because the target is frequently moving. Even a crack shot would never claim that shoot at = dead as an absolute. In other words, shooting at is indivisible from wounding.

Wounding creates difficulties for both sides

Because the Countryside Alliance seeks to defend all country sports and, indeed, maintains a distinct Campaign for Shooting in-house, just as it does a Campaign for Hunting, it is obviously constrained in tackling the issue of wounding as between the various methods used to control the fox population.

Accordingly, the only occasion recorded by the writer on which Mr. Simon Hart, for the Countryside Alliance, made reference to the issue was during his contribution to the end-of-seminar round-the table summaries when, fairly and squarely, he pointed out that, at the conclusion of a hunt, the fox would be either dead or alive but in neither case would it have been wounded.

It was a disappointing feature of the contributions to the seminar that an issue of such fundamental importance to the welfare of the fox was given such token if, in that instance, unequivocal treatment.

FWS hopes and trusts that in the Committee’s report to HMG it will get an airing that is more in line with its importance.

The numbers game!

According to Prof. Harris, or rather to my note of one of his numbers, c.85,000 foxes are typically killed per annum as a result of being shot at in England and Wales.

The writer’s recollection was that his figure for foxes killed annually by MFHA-registered hunts was of the order of 16-17,000.

His understanding of the results reported by the other contractor was that its figure for numbers killed as a result of being shot at was somewhat higher.

In terms of agony-intensity, snaring and poisoning combine both pain and time, with the latter indivisible from collateral environmental damage (please refer to FWS’s primary evidence page 12).

Taking Prof. Harris’s figure of 17,000, the following emerges:-

FWS makes no claim as to the precision of such derived figures save to say that those in the first and third columns are in line with anecdote and personal observation.

Shooting humane???????

Again without test, save by way of personal canvass, FWS believes that were the general public and its elected representatives to become aware that the wounding rate could be even roughly approaching the above numbers, never mind the percentages compared with wounding-free hunting (MFHA-style), it is unlikely that it would continue to regard shooting, by comparison, as humane.

Quarry species deserve wider terms of reference relevant to species welfare

Because it hopes that public opinion will shift "seismically" against shooting at as an appropriate alternative to hunting with dogs, FWS hopes and believes that the Committee, having already earned itself considerable respect based, in particular, on the thoroughness with which it has sought ro probe its remit and the skilful hot-potato management of its Chairman, can bring those attributes to bear on behalf of the quarry species in a way that will persuade HMG to give it more time and broaden its terms of reference by placing more emphasis on the interests of the quarry as species.

In terms of the time allocated by HMG Secretary for investigation and preparation of the Committee’s report, FWS notes and, as self-appointed champion of the quarry species, concurs with the sentiments implicit in the Chairman’s opening remarks at the first of the seminars held at Church House, Dean’s Yard, Westminster on April 18^th 2000.

"... Again I would hope that people could recognise the position that we have that we actually have to write something in something like 6 weeks' time rather than seeing this as the first stage in an elaborate research schedule.

That may have to follow at some point and maybe that should be done,

but that is not what we can do. We have to try to come to a view about what it is that can be concluded about this subject."

There is a striking similarity between such sentiments and those expressed by Professor Bateson in the foreword to his report to The National Trust, based upon which the Trust prohibited staghunting on its land on Exmoor and the Quantock Hills.

"Studying animal welfare scientifically is still in its early stages and very little work has been done in the field on what happens to animals that have been hunted. We had to develop many of the methods that we used with very little to guide us. We also had to work quickly. Two years from conceiving a scientific project to producing a final report may seem a long time to the layman. But in practice it was a tough assignment to gather the necessary data and analyse what we obtained in the time that was available to us." (FWS’s italics).

Speed incompatible with interests of object of purported concern

Political pressure for speed is not, in the view of FWS, consistent with the needs of any but politicians while undue haste is certainly incompatible with the interests of a species vulnerable to undesirable behavioural mutation.

3. From 33 per km² to 2

Thus was the recent, disease-driven collapse in the fox population of Bristol described by Prof. Steve Harris.

To FWS it merely makes the tragic point that corruption of the Red Fox’s wildness inevitably leads to urbanisation of habit if not, in real estate development terms, always of habitat. Thereafter follows inevitable genetic deterioration of the species due to local inbreeding and increased vulnerability to disease and, when it arrives, accelerated transmission thereof due to excessive density of population comprised of degraded stock.

To the writer’s astonishment, Prof. Harris’s graphic mathematical summary of the Bristol disaster was not picked up and commented upon by any other participant. Yet, in the opinion of FWS, what happened to the vulpine fast food addicts of Bristol is proof positive that, as a species, the glorious creature that is the wild Red Fox will only survive as glorious, healthy and vigorous if it discouraged as far as possible from fraternisation and cohabitation with humans.

Most are shocked and resentful if told that feeding their friends is cruel!

Widespread feeding by well-intentioned citizens converts wild foxes to stray dogs within one generation. This behavioural mutation, which is the inevitable consequence of direct (hand-feeding) and/or indirect (McBin, McTip, McLayby), "little-or-no-vulpine-effort-required" messing, becomes practicably irreversible within this time period.

My spaniel is a genetically modified wolf out of which humans have bred wildness (independence) and substituted tameness (dependence)!

Being kind to the Red Fox, as a species, does not mean compromising its independence by making life easy for it. It means keeping it wild.

In the meantime, "33/km² to 2km²" and

support FWS’s case for hunting most succinctly albeit most tragically.

"If you are currently feeding wild rural foxes, we would like to hear from you. We have a machine that produces sausages that are irresistible to foxes ... we would like you to give these sausages to the foxes you are feeding ..."

School of Biosciences, University of Bristol quoted in BBC Wildlife magazine, Jan 2000 edition (please see font page of FWS’s primary evidence as previously submitted).

Breathtaking, isn’t it? When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?

Charles Drury, Director, ... for wildness’ sake^©, May 9th 2000.

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Date uploaded to website 9 May 2000