Guest seems to have picked up his perception of hunting from some pre-war treatise. Blooding a novice hunter hasn't been done for nearly half a century.
It probaby doesn't matter a whit, though, because the whole issue - pro and anti - is based on misconceptions and prejudice. The antis seem to divide into those who are genuinely convinced that fox-hunting is cruel and therefore incompatible with civilised values, and those who see the fight for a ban as a skirmish in the class war (with some cross-over between the two values). The pro-hunt lobby seems to be divided between the libertarians who see the UK as prey to too many restrictive laws and see liberty being eroded, and those who see hunting as a battlefield in a struggle between urban and rural values.
That doesn't stop rural people being passionately anti-hunting or urban types being pro-hunting (when I was a child in London I used to go beagling in Oxforshire regularly, which is one of the reasons my knees are knackered now!). What it does mean is that the passion and prejudice on both sides makes reasoned debate nigh impossible.
Having hunted myself, I am pro-hunting, although I accept that many hunts - particularly those near to London - have more than their share of tossers and wankers who have taken up the sport because they think it'll give them the trappings of gentility (you don't see many of them hunting with the fell packs or my local hunt in West Wales though!).
I also accept and respect the right of others to disagree with hunting, as with shooting and fishing.
What I don't accept is for those who disagree to have the right to shout down, intimidate and threaten people (and I have been on the receiving end of that sort of behaviour).
As for the notion of 'the voice of the people', without debating Rousseau at length, I don't believe that the ban truly represents the general will. Were we always to heed the vox populis, as has been claimed for the current ban, we would probably still have public executions in the UK, along with enforced castration, the odd lynching and enforced deportation of asylum seekers.
The debate on fox hunting has been far from civilised and it is not yet over.