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Do they have a hunt club in your county?

I remember some decades ago there was a hue and cry about how “the poor defenseless fox is being hounded into extinction simply for being a fox!”

And departed cats give you the sadz did you say?

How are you not so overwrought by the destruction of Twitter and all hope for humankind (Google approves of humankind over mankind while apparently failing to notice the word MAN in the word human) that you can even see straight?

We were cleaning a bit the other day and ran across a picture of sweet Emmylou the dog who met an unfortunate and untimely end. So also the sadz for photos unearthed from a drawer or cabinet.

There is an active hunt in our county, ExpressoBold, but I cooled on the idea when I discovered they blast through the countryside cutting a swath of destruction. A couple of years ago, they rode through a cat sanctuary and several of the moggies were never seen again afterwards.

The cure sounds worse than the disease.

ExpressoBold:

Actual “foxhunting”, i.e. chasing a live fox with hounds on horseback, was banned in England in 2005 on grounds of cruelty. About 180 “hunts” (not “hunt clubs”) still “ride to hounds”, but after dragged baits.

In any case, by the Victorian period, the point of “hunting” was not killing foxes to get rid of them. Indeed, shooting a fox was “not done” by gentlemen. The “bad baronet” of Ruddigore shot a fox, which his ancestors accepted as his daily crime.

Rich Rostrom:
My understanding has always been that the point of hunting–even in the Victorian age and after–was indeed to kill the fox, although I believe (without having any specific source to point to) that the killing was done by a means other than shooting, as it was important to be able to cut off and keep the mask and tail, for taxidermy purposes. The problem with shooting foxes alluded to in Ruddigore was shooting them out of fox-hunting season, not as part of the hunt. . .thus undermining the preservation efforts undertaken to ensure that there would be a sufficient supply of foxes to be hunted. One of the tales collected in Kipling’s Stalky & Company (“An Unsavoury Interlude”) involves the protagonists’ discovery that the keeper employed by a local landowner is shooting foxes, and McTurk’s insistence on confronting the landowner to inform him of it, much to the horror of Stalky & Beetle:
‘“Lo-look here, sir. Do—do you shoot foxes? Because, if you don’t, your keeper does. We’ve seen him! I do-don’t care what you call us—but it’s an awful thing. It’s the ruin of good feelin’ among neighbors. A ma-man ought to say once and for all how he stands about preservin’. It’s worse than murder, because there’s no legal remedy.” McTurk was quoting confusedly from his father, while the old gentleman made noises in his throat.’

I thought the object was

“we’ll catch a fox
and put him in a box
and never let him go”

but it’s been a while since I heard that little ditty.