What's Wrong With Fox Hunting? – The Daily Sceptic

Fox hunting is back in the news. Last week Labour reiterated its pledge to crack down on the ‘sport’, including ‘trail hunting’ which it described as a smokescreen for the real thing.

The hunting of foxes is fervently championed, not only by its practitioners, but by many who regard it as a noble rural tradition. To examine this claim, I want to test the argument postulated by the late Roger Scruton, a philosopher I have long admired. His defence presented in his short monograph, On Hunting, is among the most elegant and beguiling. If he can’t convince us through reason that fox hunting is morally acceptable, who can?

Describing his love for the ‘sport of kings’, he expresses the commonplace that it represents an essential feature of English country life. He describes its beauty, its contribution to the preservation of the countryside and the social equality it sustains. There is, however, little compassion for the quarry to which he contends the hunter adopts a “quasi-religious attitude”:

The hunted animal is hunted as an individual. But the hunted species is elevated to divine status as the totem, and a kind of mystical union of the tribe with its totem seals the pact between them for ever… For the brief moment of the chase [the fox] is an individual… Once killed, however, he returns to his archetypal condition, reassuming his nature as The Fox, whom the huntsman knows and loves, and whose eternal recurrence is his deep desire. (Pages 73,76)

It may seem somewhat incongruous to love a creature whose violent death you ardently pursue. But, in lyrical prose, he declares that to relate to animals “as wild things” we must see them “as we see nature when the divine idea shines through to us”, and this is never more likely to happen than when hunting amid the herd and the pack, “on the lively scent of a fox who streams through the hedgerows, staking out the landscape with a matrix of primeval desire” (p. 79). He describes too the love between huntsman and the animals — horses and hounds — that are accessories in the chase.

The terror, distress and killing of the fox are, of course, secondary to the claimed virtues of the activity. But, for Scruton, animals have neither rights nor duties. If they did, “lions would be murderers, cuckoos usurpers, mice burglars and magpies thieves”. Moreover, the fox would be the worst of criminals worthy of the death penalty because it kills not only for food, “but with a wanton appetite for death and destruction. … [T]o treat animals as moral beings is to mistreat them – it is to make demands which they could not satisfy, since they cannot understand them as demands” (p.132). It does not follow, he allows, that we have a licence to treat animals as we wish:

When a beaten fox, driven from covert into the open, sees that he cannot cross to safety and so turns back to his death, his despairing movements are utterly pitiable. His eyes are no longer alert, his crafty expression has vanished… In that moment the individual is all: for unlike the species he must die. If you could save him you would. (p.132). But he will not be saved because the pleasure of hunting comes in spite of death, and not because of it. (pp.132-33)

Scruton’s scruples

Scruton’s spirited defence is largely, and unashamedly, humancentric. His genuine love of hunting is almost palpable. But in seeking to justify the practice he commits at least four unexpected and uncharacteristic fallacies.

He rightly condemns trophy hunters and the cruelty of fishing and factory farming; he does so in order to demonstrate that, unlike these activities, the hunted fox is “given a chance” to escape his fate. To justify X by asserting that Y is worse is the logical fallacy of relative privation. It is, of course, true that there is no shortage of practices that cause animals pain, suffering and death. It is also true that shooting a lion from the safety of a vehicle “and to gloat in triumph as the victim drops to the ground in agony” (p.138) is repugnant, but does the fox really have a fair prospect to escape his killing when pursued by a pack of crazed dogs and a group of eager hunters on excited horses?
He says hunting “awakens a lively and unsentimental sympathy for animal, of a kind unknown to the lover of pets”.(p.83). Are all pet lovers really incapable of an unsentimental attitude toward their animals? Here he perpetrates the informal fallacy of hasty generalisation.
He asserts that “the fox will gain nothing from the abolition of hunting… [which] might offer the fox the best form of coexistence with humans who have no other motive to protect him or to conserve his habitat … [and] hunting discriminates against the old and diseased. For it is not easy to catch a healthy fox” (p.134). This is surely mere speculation, and the “might” is an appeal to probability: the logical fallacy of assuming the truth of a proposition because it might possibly be the case: possibiliter ergo probabiliter.
He declares that apart from hunting the fox, “humans… have no other motive to protect him or to conserve his habitat”. (p.135). This is far from uncontentious, and surprisingly constitutes the logical fallacy of ipse dixit: an assertion lacking proof.

It is disappointing that one of our leading philosophers should be culpable of dodgy reasoning. Might it suggest that, as David Hume maintains, reason is indeed “the slave of the passions”?

Raymond Wacks is a Professor of Law.