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I like your line of reasoning Fred. To try and justify this activity on the grounds of it being a necessary method of maintaining the countryside as we know it, is surely an insult to most peoples intelligence. I can not really see how the British countryside is going to turn into some sort of post apocolyptic Orwellian wasteland, with hoards of ravenous foxes terrorising the remaining population. This argument was never even mentioned before it started looking like a ban was likely. As I alluded to in my original question a society that tollerates this kind of institutionalised cruelty, can not really call itself truly civilised. Child cruelty, wife beating and abuse of those below one in the social strata were all commonplace and to some extent acceptable, within the last hundred years, but this kind of behavior would now, quite rightly, get one locked up. Without being too flippant it sometimes seems that people who wish to justify a continuance of fox hunting are the same people who were outraged when slavery and child labour, and the "droit de signeur" were abolished. They probably also think that women should never have been given the vote and we should never have given our empire away, but that is another story.....