Every year, on Boxing Day, you’d be forgiven for thinking that bad things stop happening everywhere else in the world and that the only item worth reporting on the BBC news is a 
bunch of toffee-nosed Hoorays dressing up in silly costumes and racing around the countryside.
Actually, until the foxhunting ban was imposed in 2005, it was really quite sick watching these privileged prats set off to chase foxes to exhaustion, then tear them apart with packs of hounds. But it seems that some are still at it!
A few days ago, the RSPCA brought successful charges against the Heythrop Hunt in Oxfordshire, where Richard Sumner and Julian Barnfield were found guilty of hunting foxes with dogs. In other words, they were deliberately breaking the law. The Heythrop Hunt also pleaded guilty to the same charges.
As a further nail in the coffin of the pro-hunt lobby, a story today suggests that the government isn’t going to allow a vote to take place that it is likely to lose, so a repeal of the foxhunting ban isn’t likely to happen in 2013.
Research/opinion polls suggest that only 15% of the population supports the idea of scrapping the ban. It isn’t hard to imagine who the 15% are. A more recent update to the story makes it clear that the government would lose a vote if one were held.
Some of the comments at the bottom of that earlier article make interesting reading.
And since the BBC has nothing else to report on Boxing Day, it makes a big deal out of a French hunt. The title just about says it all – a city man can’t understand our life – but this quote says even more:
Hunt Master Mathieu Berge explains that while he accepts hunting is “cruel”, he believes it is a part of country life that “a city man will never understand”.
Those who are pro-hunting over here should just man up and admit they have the same sentiments. It IS cruel – but they just don’t care. And they think they’re special – but they aren’t.