Pot and kettle

Sorry I have not posted for a while I have been busy reading Baily's Hunting Directory and enjoying the antics of Charles James. However it seems there has been a report this week that one of the anti-hunting people has apparently said that hunt supporters and hunt staff should 'grow up'. There is a human saying that I think applies here, it goes “the pot calling the kettle black.” Let me explain why.

Anti-hunting people who turn up to disrupt legal hunting activities almost always have their faces covered so they can't be identified, but they insist that hunt supporters must not do the same. The female human I live with has told me that over all the years she has been following hounds, she has only ever seen 2 anti-hunting people who did not do this. I can't understand why they do it if their intentions are as pure and honest as they claim. Many of these people spend a large part of the time when out on those days shouting and screaming abuse, often very vitriolic and deliberately offensive; to me, this appears little better than playground bullying, especially as it seems to be done to try to provoke a response that they can then use as propaganda to claim that hunt supporters started the trouble.
Another example that illustrates the childish approach of many anti-hunting people is given in a LACS blog posted on Thursday in which claims of cruelty are made. However, there is nothing to say when or where the acts were supposed to have happened, no real evidence at all, just a lot of unsubstantiated half-baked allegations that they expect people to believe just because they have made the assertion. My favourite part of that blog is the accusation that hunters are 'little more than thugs'. This from an organisation which has a number of members who have been known to indulge in physical attacks against hunt supporters, or anyone that they believe to have links to hunts. I've heard of a number of incidents where anti-hunt people have turned up with baseball bats, home-made caltrops, or other improvised weapons – but they seem to think it's acceptable when they do it. And if they love animals so much, I can't see why so many have taken actions that hurt them – paint thrown over children's ponies, hounds beaten to death with hammers, or even whole packs of hounds stolen and the only one recovered having been mutilated.
So who really needs to 'grow up' here? I know who I would pick.

The Myth About Animal Rights

Sorry to all Orpheus blog readers, I know I haven't written for a while but there hasn't really been anything I felt strongly enough about to take my attention away from hearing about the start of the season. The weather hasn't helped much, all the snow we've had recently has been fun but hasn't given me much inspiration.

What has changed today is something that I overheard my retirement pack humans talking about. It seems that there is something on UK television Channel 4 that is called '4thought' which humans can use for telling other people about things that are important to them. The one that was on tonight was given by Professor Stein, who does experiments on animals to find cures for human diseases, and he was talking about his belief that animals don't have the same rights as humans.

A lot of people think that animal 'rights' are important, and that we should be treated like mini-humans. I want to look at this a bit more closely.

As I understand it, humans have a concept of 'rights' which defines how they can expect to be treated by other humans. If someone breaks the rules, there are ways that they can be punished. But these 'rights' are tied to another concept – 'obligations'. Sometimes a single 'right' can be tied to several 'obligations'. So if a human wants to have a right, they have to accept the obligation or obligations that are tied to it – for example, the human 'right' to have pets or livestock brings with it obligations around making sure they provide suitable shelter, food, access to water, vet's attention when needed, and protection from predators or disease.

As a hound, I can tell you that animals don't think about the world in the same way as humans. We don't understand 'obligations', we have only our instincts to tell us what we need at any time. To me, this means that animals cannot possibly have 'rights' in the same way as humans, purely because we don't interact with the world in the same way.

This doesn't mean that I would be happy if humans were to be mean to me, but they need to drop the idea of animal 'rights' and think more along the lines of animal 'welfare' obligations tied to the rights to have pets or livestock. In parallel, the right to keep livestock has an obligation tied to it to protect those animals from others that might harm them. Hounds were developed to help protect livestock from those predators.

Anti-hunting humans use the idea of animal rights to argue against using hounds for the role of protector that comes naturally to us. I agree with Professor Stein, we don't have rights in the same way as humans, but it is against our welfare to stop us from doing what comes naturally to us.

Fairness and the UK National Media

Retirement can be a bit on the quiet side sometimes.  Don't get me wrong, it's great being able to have a bit of a lie in, and watching all the rain we've had recently from inside the house has been wonderful, but I do have a lot of time on my paws to try to fill up somehow.  When I run out of other things to do, I try to keep an ear to the ground to find out what's going on in the wider world.

In one of these quiet spells this week, I took a look at the newspapers and media websites.  I was very surprised to see just how many of them seem to ignore the idea of fairness in reporting and come down very firmly on the side of the humans who are trying to stop people hunting.  Oh, I'm not talking about the local ones – a lot of those are very good about giving equal time to both sides and letting people know about the helpful things that hunts do – but a lot of the national ones in the UK do seem to be particularly keen to only mention things that put hunting in a bad light or promote the views of anti-hunting humans.

As a case in point from this week, I noticed that the BBC news website had a 'Watch and Listen' interview with Brian May about 'saving foxes'.  Now, if they were truly impartial, they should also do a similar interview with someone who supports hunting.  But I'm still waiting to see anything like that.  And the BBC are not alone in this.  If a story can be told in a way that makes hunting look bad, or something that is only done by “nasty” rich humans, then they publish it at top speed – but anything that goes against this is ignored or pushed aside.  And the threatening acts from some of the anti-hunting humans almost appear to be considered to be not just acceptable but actively encouraged, when if they were done for any other reason they would be condemned as totally wrong.

This is not journalism as it should be.  The politest thing I can say about it is that there is a strong element of bias in such behaviour.  It is a worrying development when national media become so one-sided in their reporting.  It opens the door to those with their own agenda using the media to spread propaganda on their behalf.  From there it is a short step to censorship and deliberate misinformation.  And that is something that I and many others would hate to see.

What’s in a Name?

Now that I've settled in to my retirement home, I can start thinking more about hunting and hunting people. Hounds like me get to see and hear all sorts of stuff, but not many of us get a chance to tell you humans what we think – so I'm going to make the most of my chance to do exactly that. 

Like who on earth called me Orpheus? And why

Well, its a convention thing you see, each year most packs pick the next letter in the alphabet (unless for 'traditional reasons' they miss a letter) and I was born on an 'O' year. Orpheus was a mythical singer that had a great voice so I suppose I was well named as I do have a great booming baritone voice and I am not afraid to use it when pursuing the local rabbit population. I suppose I am lucky, in the past some foxhounds have had the names 'Tosspot' and 'Toilet' given to them, now that really IS unlucky!

But this naming thing is not only peculiar to hounds, it also happens to hunts, and it not a bad thing either.

As their circumstances change hunts grow and amalgamate and to reflect this growth they sometimes change their names, fortunately as Baily's subscribers will know (and I am just finding out) we are the only comprehensive database of current hunts and hunt history, so even name changes are always captured, they are never lost to history. 

One of the things I've heard about recently has been the name change at one of the foxhound packs, and that some of the humans who follow them don't want it to happen, they want to keep the old name. I did hear that there's been a lot of argument about this. Maybe it's a basset thing as we are used to packs changing their names and amalgamating but I can't see why it should matter what the pack is called, the important thing is that they keep hunting. I also think that we get enough flak from the humans who don't like hunting (or is it that in reality they just don't like us?) without giving them more ammunition by fighting about such little things publicly. 

Given that TB is meant to have put in his book that he tried to sabotage the horrible Hunting Act. (I'm not sure that we can believe him, if he really wanted to do that why was the Parliament Act used to force it through?) but I digress, this is the best possible news we could have and yet people fail to make the most of it, but concentrate their efforts arguing about name changes!

It's about time that the hunting humans started concentrating on the important things like telling others the truth about what we do, and stop wasting time on the little things. Otherwise more lies and half-truths will get spread, and people will think that these must be true because we are too busy fighting ourselves to tell them the facts.

New Season, New Beginings

It's been a very strange week. Last Saturday, it all started as normal in the kennels and there was nothing to suggest that my whole world was about to change. Then, late in the morning, a couple of strange humans turned up and I found myself hauled out of the pack and going on a long journey – what had I done to deserve this! The journey was enlivened by me entertaining a French family who were so busy admiring me they almost forgot which side of the road they wanted!

I guess this means I'm not a working Basset any more! On the plus side, I am now allowed in a house with the others in my new pack, and can enjoy my retirement now that we have worked out the pack order – or almost, as Jake (a Springer and therefore psychotic) can't quite accept that I'm number 3 after the humans. I'm sure he'll come round in the end.

Of course, the whole retirement thing was a bit of a surprise. The others at kennels had been talking about how some humans who don't like hunting had been telling stories that hounds who can't keep up with the pack any more get killed off, which had me worried as I struggled a bit last season. So you can guess that I was pretty chuffed to be sent to a new home instead.

This got me thinking about the way that humans say things that are not true or twist things around if they think it will make other humans do something that they want. I guess that some of the humans who don't like hunting have said a lot of things over the years to make others think that what we do is bad, and to make out that it's OK for them to be nasty to us and our humans just because they don't like us. I think that's stupid, and there's no excuse for being violent whatever they think about us.

At least we hounds always let you know exactly what we think about things. And I think that I could have a lot of fun in my new home.