Unpopular Opinions

Banning foxhunting was a mistake.

Foxes are a threat to every endangered small mammal in this country. If a fox gets into a hen coop (and there really is no way of completely protecting chickens), it will slaughter every one of them. Foxes account for the deaths of 1-2% of lambs born in this country every year. A high population of foxes means more are driven into urban areas where they spread diseases, fight with cats and dogs, and kill rabbits and guinea-pigs.

The only reasons that people oppose fox hunting is because they are ignorant about it. I have quizzed antis and honestly been stunned by little they knew. I told one who opposed because he was an "animal lover" about the 20,000 hounds dependent on the hunt for their lives, and he said they could be people's pets. For one thing, it's not as though we have a shortage of unwanted dogs, and for another who's going to want a pet that disappears the first time you take it for a walk and never comes back? I remember a while ago someone on here had an avatar of a pair of fox cubs with something like "the dogs are killing your mother" under it. Whoever that was, the hunting season does not begin until after cubs have finished leaving their mothers; the time when the population is highest and there is the most competition for territory, so it is necessary to thin out the old or ill foxes (the only ones that are killed by dogs because the hunt makes so much noise that the fit ones can make themselves scarce well in advance). Without hunting, you see more and more foxes being forces to venture into farms and urban areas where they cause all of the problems.

Hunting with dogs is not inhumane. Dogs instinctively kill the fox almost instantly, by severing its spine. If someone shoots a fox and doesn't get a headshot, it can take hours for it to bleed to death, if a trap isn't checked regularly enough, any animal caught in it can starve to death. Poison kills badgers and hedgehogs that go for meat. All of the alternative methods kill foxes indiscriminately, rather than only killing the ones too unfit to escape from a hunt.

Up to 2005, hunting reduced the UK fox population by around 23000 (9%) each year, while there was no change in the overall number of foxes from year to year. After 5 years of the fox population being allowed to grow, we seem to have reached the tipping point where in the last 2 months there have been 3 cases of people being bitten by foxes (the twin babies, a toddler at a nursery, and a teenage girl who was asleep in her garden), and unless fox numbers are brought back under control then that sort of incident is only going to become more common.

I also agree with Annie. My problem is how they make it into a sport. Fancy uniforms and making a day out of it disgusts me more than the actual event itself. Killing the foxes may be necessary, the uniforms surely are not.

Without meaning to derail things..

Based on my limited knowledge of ecology, shouldn't the Fox population reach an optimum level anyway?

I thought the whole system was supposed to be balanced based on available resources and natural interspecies competition.

This in mind, we've kinda skewed the natural order things in many ways anyway, with livestock farming and urbanisation. Meaning food is readily available in the form of livestock and urban environments lend themselves to scavengers. Essentially suggesting we may have created the fox population problem. This is why I dislike the idea of hunting as population control, it seems like a bit of a sh*tty, graceless solution to something we've potentially caused to be a problem.

If the average amount of foxes killed on a hunt is less than one then how come they reduce the population by an average of 23000?

Also hunting vixens?
Hunting pregnant vixens?
Hunting vixens with a nest of cubs?
Hunting the fox that a next of cubs + vixen depend on for food?

Sure I don't think the vixen would sit there & starve, but it could happen...

Beat policing is a job for a 6ft+ man. Like f*ck do people feel protected/assured by someone they could run through.

I think Muse are whiney dogsh*te.