The existing Hunting Act (2004) in England and Wales needs strengthening and reform to ensure British wildlife is fully protected from the mass hunting with hounds that still prevails in 2022.

The 2018 hunting season saw 550 reports of illegal hunting, though these figures only represent known incidents. However, hard evidence is much more available, hundreds of videos are shared on social media that illustrate the mass scale of which this illegal sport continues to thrive in rural communities. Native mammals, such as badger, various deer species, and particularly red foxes, are actively chased to exhaustion and eventually torn apart by huge numbers of hounds at a time, all under the guise of trail hunting, which is legal. In reality, hunt organisers lay routes deliberately close to where foxes are known to reside, meaning they quickly become the subject of a hunt.

Setting aside the barbarity of fox hunting, national Breeding Bird Survey’s suggests rural red fox numbers have declined by 41% since 1995. Pushed to urban environments where they face disease, road hazards, or labelled as a pest.

In Britain, the red fox is one of our last remaining iconic mammals and plays an essential role in the ecology of our landscape. Wolf, brown bear, and lynx all once roamed our lands but were hunted to extinction, rendering many of our ecosystems now defunct and reliant on human management in their absence. For example, deer management costs the UK economy hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Strengthening the existing Hunting Act is critical in the midst of a biodiversity crises.

A poll in 2017 found 85% of the British public want fox hunting prohibited.

The Conservative Party's winning manifesto included pledges including "delivering one of the best animal welfare policies in the world", claiming "animal cruelty has no place in a modern society", and pledged to end the import and export of trophy hunting on the grounds of it being "morally indefensible". It is questionable that the British Government pledged to deliver the best animal welfare policies in the world whilst thousands of mammals are subject to the terrors of being chased to exhaustion and ripped apart by brawls of hounds in the name of sport.

We are calling on the British Government to stand by their manifesto commitment to animal welfare and animal rights and significantly strengthen the Hunting Act 2004.