Well as a country dweller these past thirty years I can tell you that illegal foxhunting still goes on apace. You don't have to believe me, of course. The bloody thing is well nigh impossible to police and the hunters know it. When the ban was threatened, a big part of the hunting lobby's case was that they were preserving valuable fox habitat that had a really good knock-on effect on other wildlife. What they were saying, of course, was that they weren't interested in wiping out foxes at all. They wanted their bloodsport and they would maintain habitat in order to keep it going. How nice of them!

Hunting is a pastime for brainless twats who would kill anything that moves. The farmers round here train their kids to shoot at crows just for target practice. They have time to kill because their fields are full of low-maintenance elephant grass that has everything to do with making a profit without work and nothing to do with producing food.

But I wouldn't ban hunting or bullfighting or any other allegedly cruel sport. Good argument and ridicule are the way to go and our politicians have more urgent stuff to deal with. It's amazing how some people get all hoity-toity abut foxhunting yet they think nothing of buying cheap barn eggs or a chicken that was raised in a dark barn all its life with 50000 other birds.