For centuries, riders in red coats have chased foxes across the British countryside in the name of tradition.
This episode tells the story of fox hunting, from royal sport to culture war, and asks why it still provokes such strong feelings.
Although it was banned by the 2004 Hunting Act, a legal loophole allowed it to continue, and that loophole may now be closing.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the second part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:29] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange puppet show that became one of the most recognisable traditions of the British seaside. In part three, next up, we'll be zooming in on the seaside itself, and talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:00:49] But in today's episode, part two, we are talking about something completely different.
[00:00:55] It's more violent, more controversial, and also illegal.
[00:01:00] And that is fox hunting.
[00:01:02] This is not just a story about whether British people like foxes. It is a story about social class, the city vs the countryside and where to draw the line between preserving tradition and tolerating unnecessary cruelty.
[00:01:20] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:26] In 1981, Disney released a film called the Fox and the Hound. It told the story of an unlikely friendship between a fox and a dog, following them from when they were young puppies playing together, to the realisation that they were being brought up to be enemies.
[00:01:48] It was the most expensive animated film ever made at that point, and, as it was a Disney film for kids, everything ended well. Nobody really gets hurt, and everyone lives happily ever after.
[00:02:04] Forty-five years later, another fox-and-hound story is still played out in dozens of villages across the English countryside. But this version is much darker.
[00:02:19] It starts happily enough, with a crowd of people gathered in a field or outside a pub, most on horseback.
[00:02:29] They wear black or red coats, white breeches, and polished black boots. The smell of horses is in the air. There is a pack of forty or fifty dogs milling around. A glass of port, strong, fortified wine, is handed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:02:50] The steam of breath on cold winter air. A horn sounds, and the humans, dogs and horses thunder off across the muddy fields.
[00:03:03] You might think it all sounds perfectly harmless so far.
[00:03:07] What happens next is not so harmless.
[00:03:11] The dogs, all being well, will pick up the scent of a fox. They will relentlessly follow the scent, chasing the fox across fields, ditches and woods, until it cannot run any more. The pack of dogs will then pounce on the fox, ripping it to pieces.
[00:03:32] It is no fairytale ending. It is also illegal, and has been for more than twenty years.
[00:03:40] So, why is it still tacitly allowed, where does it all come from, and why do some people resist the government's attempts to restrict it so fiercely?
[00:03:53] To answer those questions, we have to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:58] Now, foxes have always been a nuisance to farmers. They sneak in during the night and kill their chickens. They kill lambs in the lambing season.
[00:04:10] They are clever, hard to trap, and prolific, in other words, there are lots of them.
[00:04:17] So, for as long as people have been keeping livestock in the British Isles, they have been killing foxes. This killing was, for the most part, practical; farmers, gamekeepers, and shepherds did it with traps, with poison, and with packs of dogs. It was pest control, not "sport".
[00:04:41] And in any case, for most of the medieval and early modern period, hunting for sport, for enjoyment, was the preserve of the aristocracy, those at the top of society.
[00:04:56] And the beast you hunted was deer.
[00:05:01] Kings, dukes, and aristocrats kept enormous private deer parks, and to hunt a stag, the male deer, was the privilege of the elite.
[00:05:14] The fox, by comparison, was vermin. Hunting a lowly fox was something a farmer might do to protect his sheep or chickens.
[00:05:24] Hunting a majestic stag was something a king did.
[00:05:29] This all started to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it changed because of two things.
[00:05:38] The first was that the deer population started to collapse.
[00:05:43] Centuries of hunting meant that by 1700 or so, the great deer herds of medieval England were largely gone; the aristocrats had killed most of them.
[00:05:55] The second change was the landscape itself. England used to be full of forests and woods, which provided the natural habitat for deer.
[00:06:07] Much of this had been cut down to make way for agricultural land, for fields. And then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was something called enclosure, and this transformed the English countryside one step further.
[00:06:25] What this meant was that these big open fields were divided into smaller patches of farmland, divided by neat hedgerows and ditches.
[00:06:38] This just so happened to be almost perfect terrain for a different kind of hunt. A hunt that involved galloping flat-out across country, jumping over hedges and streams, and following a fast-running animal across miles of open ground.
[00:06:57] And that animal was the fox.
[00:07:02] There was one more thing in the fox's favour, at least from the hunter's point of view.
[00:07:08] A female deer, or a doe, typically has between one and three babies per year. A female fox, or a vixen, will typically produce four or five babies, or cubs, every spring. And in some cases, many more, sometimes ten or more.
[00:07:29] What this meant was that a hunt could ride out every Saturday of the season, kill a fox each time, and the fox population would scarcely notice.
[00:07:41] To the huntsman, this made the fox both a worthy adversary and effectively unlimited in supply.
[00:07:52] Now, fox hunting in its modern form is traditionally credited to one man: a Leicestershire landowner named Hugo Meynell.
[00:08:04] In 1753, at the age of eighteen, Meynell took over a pack of hounds at Quorndon Hall, and over the next half-century he supposedly transformed fox hunting.
[00:08:18] He bred faster, more athletic hounds. He trained them to follow the scent of a fox at speed. He pioneered the kind of long, hard, cross-country chase that became the model for every hunt that followed.
[00:08:36] Now, some modern historians have pushed back a little on this story, saying that the neat tale of Meynell as the lone genius who invented fox hunting is probably a little exaggerated.
[00:08:49] Whether it was Meynell alone, or whether he simply became the face of something that was already happening all over the country, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of our story.
[00:09:01] The important thing to understand is that by the early 1800s the basic shape of the thing we now call fox hunting was in place.
[00:09:12] And by the time we get to the Victorian era, the hunt had become something much more than a country pursuit.
[00:09:21] It had become an institution.
[00:09:26] Each hunt had a defined territory, sometimes covering several counties.
[00:09:32] Each had a Master of Foxhounds, who was the senior figure, often a wealthy local landowner.
[00:09:41] Each had a professional staff in charge of the dogs and horses.
[00:09:46] The hunt had its own kennels, its own stables, its own subscription system, even its own dinner club.
[00:09:55] It also had its own clothing. Senior figures wore a scarlet coat, which, for reasons no one can quite agree on, is traditionally called "hunting pink".
[00:10:09] Most riders wore black or navy.
[00:10:13] Fox hunting also had its own vocabulary. Foxes were not called male and female. They were dog foxes and vixens. The fox's tail was a brush.
[00:10:28] The animals chasing the fox were never called dogs.
[00:10:31] They were a pack of hounds, with names and ranks.
[00:10:36] The huntsman did not call them with a whistle. He called them with a horn and with hunting cries like "tally-ho" and "gone away".
[00:10:47] The hunt also had its own ritual. The meet, where the hunt gathered, which was usually in front of a village pub or a country house.
[00:10:57] The stirrup cup, which is the small glass of port or cherry brandy passed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:11:06] The blessing of the hounds. The blowing of the horn. The first cast across a field, meaning the first time the hounds were sent out across a field to try to catch the scent of a fox.
[00:11:19] And it could be a long day too.
[00:11:22] A day's hunting, from start to finish, could last six or seven hours. The hounds would be sent out across a field, picking up the scent of a fox.
[00:11:33] The hunt would gallop after them, often for miles, over hedges and ditches and walls. Riders would fall. Horses would go lame. A fox might be killed at the end of it, or might escape into a wood or down a drain.
[00:11:51] Then the hunt would move on to a new patch of country and start again. By the end of the afternoon the riders would be cold, tired and muddy. They would get off the horses, perhaps gather back at the pub, eat, drink, and tell stories about the day.
[00:12:12] And hunting was not an activity for everyone; fox hunting was overwhelmingly an upper-class and rural-middle-class pursuit. A subscription to a hunt was expensive. The horse, the kit, the time off work mid-week or on a Saturday: all of it cost money.
[00:12:33] Farmers were welcomed, because the hunt rode across their land. But the masters of foxhounds, the people who actually ran the hunts, these were almost always the people who owned the big country houses and the fields around them.
[00:12:50] Now, even back in the Victorian era, it had its fair share of detractors. In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde famously summed up the English fox hunt, calling it "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
[00:13:09] In other words, all these ridiculous people chasing something that you don't even eat at the end of it.
[00:13:15] The whole thing existed for its own sake; it was pointless.
[00:13:20] By the late nineteenth century, Wilde was not alone in finding it strange. A growing number of people, particularly in the cities, were beginning to think that the violent killing of an animal for enjoyment had no place in a civilised country.
[00:13:39] And people started vocally opposing it, calling for it to be banned.
[00:13:46] The first serious organised opposition dates back to 1925.
[00:13:52] In that year, a group of campaigners founded the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, which is today known simply as the League Against Cruel Sports.
[00:14:05] Its early efforts focused on softer popular targets: like hunting rabbits with dogs, hunting otters or stags. These efforts had some success, and laid the groundwork for the idea that fox hunting wasn't untouchable.
[00:14:22] But it would take another generation for that idea to translate into direct action.
[00:14:31] In 1958, members of the League laid false scent trails to disrupt a stag hunt in the West Country.
[00:14:41] In other words, they put fake smells that would trick and confuse the hunting dogs, committing the first modern act of "hunt sabotage". This proved to be very effective, and groups sprang up throughout the country, groups that became known as "sabs", short for saboteurs.
[00:15:03] They would arrive at hunting meets with horns, whistles, and bottles of false scent. They would try to confuse the hounds, distract the huntsmen, and steer the hunt away from any actual fox.
[00:15:19] In response, the hunts would close ranks, push the saboteurs away, and complain to the police about people trespassing on private property.
[00:15:30] On bad days, the two sides came to blows. People were injured. In the 1990s, two saboteurs were killed while trying to prevent a hunt.
[00:15:44] Meanwhile, public opinion was shifting. By the 1990s, opinion polls regularly showed that a clear majority of British people wanted hunting with hounds banned.
[00:16:01] And in 1997, Tony Blair and Labour won a landslide general election. Although it was only a small part of the manifesto, Labour had promised to hold a vote on whether hunting with dogs should be banned.
[00:16:17] But... nothing happened.
[00:16:20] The fox hunting question sat there for the next seven years, without anything being done.
[00:16:28] In those years, the hunting debate became one of the most unusual political battles in modern British history.
[00:16:37] On the surface, it was about something that affected almost nobody's daily life. It was an incredibly niche activity, with a tiny fraction of the population doing it.
[00:16:51] And yet it produced more parliamentary debate, more political anger, and more street protest than most other domestic issues of the time.
[00:17:01] As to the question of why, well, it was partly because it had become a stand-in for a much bigger argument about rural and urban Britain.
[00:17:14] To many in the countryside, where hunting was more broadly supported, the proposed ban felt like a city-based government attacking a way of life it did not understand, and interfering in a tradition that didn't affect them.
[00:17:32] They argued that hunting was not simply a hobby for aristocrats. They said it supported rural jobs, helped manage fox numbers, kept hounds and horses in work, and formed part of the social fabric of village life.
[00:17:50] In 2002, there was a huge demonstration through London, with four hundred thousand people descending on the capital in support of hunting. At the time, it was one of the largest political demonstrations London had ever seen.
[00:18:10] And the demonstration was not really just about hunting. It was about everything that rural Britain felt the new government was getting wrong: rules on shooting, the closure of village post offices, falling farm incomes, the broad and bitter sense of being looked down on by a metropolitan political class that did not understand country life.
[00:18:35] And to many in the cities, fox hunting simply had no reason to exist. It was unnecessarily cruel, terrifying a fox into running for its life until it grew tired and was ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. This simply shouldn't be legal in a civilised society, they said.
[00:18:59] Various bills came forward, were debated, were amended, and were sent back to be debated again. The House of Commons had a huge Labour majority. It voted again and again for a total ban. The House of Lords had many hunt sympathisers, and it blocked the bills every time.
[00:19:22] And by the way, if you'd like to learn more about what that all means, and how the British political system works, I'd recommend episode number 592, as that goes into all of that in great detail.
[00:19:36] Eventually, in 2004, the government did something it almost never does.
[00:19:44] It invoked a mechanism that allows the House of Commons to overrule the House of Lords and pass a bill without their consent. The Hunting Act was only the seventh piece of legislation in nearly a century to be passed in this way.
[00:20:03] The Act made it illegal to hunt wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales, with a small number of narrow exemptions, mostly for pest control.
[00:20:15] It came into force on the 18th of February 2005.
[00:20:21] Fox hunting was, for the first time in history, illegal.
[00:20:27] But if you had thought this would have meant the hunts would have stopped, no no.
[00:20:33] The morning after the ban came into force, the hunts went out as usual. Their message was clear: the tradition would continue.
[00:20:45] Technically, what they did was something new. It was "trail hunting".
[00:20:51] A scent was laid in advance along a route across the countryside, typically the urine of a fox.
[00:20:58] The hounds were then released to follow the scent.
[00:21:03] The horses, the red coats, the horn, the meet, the stirrup cup: all of it carried on as before.
[00:21:10] In theory, the chase was now only after a trail, an artificially laid smell.
[00:21:18] And if a real fox happened to be in the way and the hounds chased it down, well, that was an unfortunate accident.
[00:21:27] Critics were not convinced. It was a ruse, they said. Trail hunting was simply fox hunting by a different name. Anti-hunting groups stepped up the pressure, monitoring hunts, filming them, and reporting incidents where they believed a real fox had been killed.
[00:21:48] Even the police were blunt about it. A senior officer described trail hunting as, and I'm quoting directly here, a "smokescreen" that "gives people the opportunity to carry on hunting, as they always said they would when the ban came in twenty years ago".
[00:22:07] There were prosecutions; people taken to court and convicted, but the punishments were typically light: a fine of a few hundred pounds or a police caution.
[00:22:20] For nearly two decades, then, the hunts, or rather the trail hunts, continued in this way.
[00:22:27] That was, until earlier this year.
[00:22:31] In March 2026, the British government announced that trail hunting itself was to be banned.
[00:22:40] It was a commitment in the Labour government's manifesto. And on the 26th of March, the Animal Welfare Minister, Baroness Sue Hayman, opened a public consultation on exactly how to bring the new ban into force.
[00:22:57] As of the time of recording, the findings haven't been published, but the loophole that has kept fox hunting alive for twenty years looks highly likely to be closed.
[00:23:09] It is bad news for the men in red coats.
[00:23:13] But if you are a fox, it might just be very good news indeed.
[00:23:20] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on fox hunting, the second of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions. Next up, in the third and final part of the mini-series, it'll be the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:23:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:39] What do you think about fox hunting? Are there similar traditions in your country, and what does the future have in store for them?
[00:23:47] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the second part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:29] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange puppet show that became one of the most recognisable traditions of the British seaside. In part three, next up, we'll be zooming in on the seaside itself, and talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:00:49] But in today's episode, part two, we are talking about something completely different.
[00:00:55] It's more violent, more controversial, and also illegal.
[00:01:00] And that is fox hunting.
[00:01:02] This is not just a story about whether British people like foxes. It is a story about social class, the city vs the countryside and where to draw the line between preserving tradition and tolerating unnecessary cruelty.
[00:01:20] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:26] In 1981, Disney released a film called the Fox and the Hound. It told the story of an unlikely friendship between a fox and a dog, following them from when they were young puppies playing together, to the realisation that they were being brought up to be enemies.
[00:01:48] It was the most expensive animated film ever made at that point, and, as it was a Disney film for kids, everything ended well. Nobody really gets hurt, and everyone lives happily ever after.
[00:02:04] Forty-five years later, another fox-and-hound story is still played out in dozens of villages across the English countryside. But this version is much darker.
[00:02:19] It starts happily enough, with a crowd of people gathered in a field or outside a pub, most on horseback.
[00:02:29] They wear black or red coats, white breeches, and polished black boots. The smell of horses is in the air. There is a pack of forty or fifty dogs milling around. A glass of port, strong, fortified wine, is handed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:02:50] The steam of breath on cold winter air. A horn sounds, and the humans, dogs and horses thunder off across the muddy fields.
[00:03:03] You might think it all sounds perfectly harmless so far.
[00:03:07] What happens next is not so harmless.
[00:03:11] The dogs, all being well, will pick up the scent of a fox. They will relentlessly follow the scent, chasing the fox across fields, ditches and woods, until it cannot run any more. The pack of dogs will then pounce on the fox, ripping it to pieces.
[00:03:32] It is no fairytale ending. It is also illegal, and has been for more than twenty years.
[00:03:40] So, why is it still tacitly allowed, where does it all come from, and why do some people resist the government's attempts to restrict it so fiercely?
[00:03:53] To answer those questions, we have to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:58] Now, foxes have always been a nuisance to farmers. They sneak in during the night and kill their chickens. They kill lambs in the lambing season.
[00:04:10] They are clever, hard to trap, and prolific, in other words, there are lots of them.
[00:04:17] So, for as long as people have been keeping livestock in the British Isles, they have been killing foxes. This killing was, for the most part, practical; farmers, gamekeepers, and shepherds did it with traps, with poison, and with packs of dogs. It was pest control, not "sport".
[00:04:41] And in any case, for most of the medieval and early modern period, hunting for sport, for enjoyment, was the preserve of the aristocracy, those at the top of society.
[00:04:56] And the beast you hunted was deer.
[00:05:01] Kings, dukes, and aristocrats kept enormous private deer parks, and to hunt a stag, the male deer, was the privilege of the elite.
[00:05:14] The fox, by comparison, was vermin. Hunting a lowly fox was something a farmer might do to protect his sheep or chickens.
[00:05:24] Hunting a majestic stag was something a king did.
[00:05:29] This all started to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it changed because of two things.
[00:05:38] The first was that the deer population started to collapse.
[00:05:43] Centuries of hunting meant that by 1700 or so, the great deer herds of medieval England were largely gone; the aristocrats had killed most of them.
[00:05:55] The second change was the landscape itself. England used to be full of forests and woods, which provided the natural habitat for deer.
[00:06:07] Much of this had been cut down to make way for agricultural land, for fields. And then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was something called enclosure, and this transformed the English countryside one step further.
[00:06:25] What this meant was that these big open fields were divided into smaller patches of farmland, divided by neat hedgerows and ditches.
[00:06:38] This just so happened to be almost perfect terrain for a different kind of hunt. A hunt that involved galloping flat-out across country, jumping over hedges and streams, and following a fast-running animal across miles of open ground.
[00:06:57] And that animal was the fox.
[00:07:02] There was one more thing in the fox's favour, at least from the hunter's point of view.
[00:07:08] A female deer, or a doe, typically has between one and three babies per year. A female fox, or a vixen, will typically produce four or five babies, or cubs, every spring. And in some cases, many more, sometimes ten or more.
[00:07:29] What this meant was that a hunt could ride out every Saturday of the season, kill a fox each time, and the fox population would scarcely notice.
[00:07:41] To the huntsman, this made the fox both a worthy adversary and effectively unlimited in supply.
[00:07:52] Now, fox hunting in its modern form is traditionally credited to one man: a Leicestershire landowner named Hugo Meynell.
[00:08:04] In 1753, at the age of eighteen, Meynell took over a pack of hounds at Quorndon Hall, and over the next half-century he supposedly transformed fox hunting.
[00:08:18] He bred faster, more athletic hounds. He trained them to follow the scent of a fox at speed. He pioneered the kind of long, hard, cross-country chase that became the model for every hunt that followed.
[00:08:36] Now, some modern historians have pushed back a little on this story, saying that the neat tale of Meynell as the lone genius who invented fox hunting is probably a little exaggerated.
[00:08:49] Whether it was Meynell alone, or whether he simply became the face of something that was already happening all over the country, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of our story.
[00:09:01] The important thing to understand is that by the early 1800s the basic shape of the thing we now call fox hunting was in place.
[00:09:12] And by the time we get to the Victorian era, the hunt had become something much more than a country pursuit.
[00:09:21] It had become an institution.
[00:09:26] Each hunt had a defined territory, sometimes covering several counties.
[00:09:32] Each had a Master of Foxhounds, who was the senior figure, often a wealthy local landowner.
[00:09:41] Each had a professional staff in charge of the dogs and horses.
[00:09:46] The hunt had its own kennels, its own stables, its own subscription system, even its own dinner club.
[00:09:55] It also had its own clothing. Senior figures wore a scarlet coat, which, for reasons no one can quite agree on, is traditionally called "hunting pink".
[00:10:09] Most riders wore black or navy.
[00:10:13] Fox hunting also had its own vocabulary. Foxes were not called male and female. They were dog foxes and vixens. The fox's tail was a brush.
[00:10:28] The animals chasing the fox were never called dogs.
[00:10:31] They were a pack of hounds, with names and ranks.
[00:10:36] The huntsman did not call them with a whistle. He called them with a horn and with hunting cries like "tally-ho" and "gone away".
[00:10:47] The hunt also had its own ritual. The meet, where the hunt gathered, which was usually in front of a village pub or a country house.
[00:10:57] The stirrup cup, which is the small glass of port or cherry brandy passed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:11:06] The blessing of the hounds. The blowing of the horn. The first cast across a field, meaning the first time the hounds were sent out across a field to try to catch the scent of a fox.
[00:11:19] And it could be a long day too.
[00:11:22] A day's hunting, from start to finish, could last six or seven hours. The hounds would be sent out across a field, picking up the scent of a fox.
[00:11:33] The hunt would gallop after them, often for miles, over hedges and ditches and walls. Riders would fall. Horses would go lame. A fox might be killed at the end of it, or might escape into a wood or down a drain.
[00:11:51] Then the hunt would move on to a new patch of country and start again. By the end of the afternoon the riders would be cold, tired and muddy. They would get off the horses, perhaps gather back at the pub, eat, drink, and tell stories about the day.
[00:12:12] And hunting was not an activity for everyone; fox hunting was overwhelmingly an upper-class and rural-middle-class pursuit. A subscription to a hunt was expensive. The horse, the kit, the time off work mid-week or on a Saturday: all of it cost money.
[00:12:33] Farmers were welcomed, because the hunt rode across their land. But the masters of foxhounds, the people who actually ran the hunts, these were almost always the people who owned the big country houses and the fields around them.
[00:12:50] Now, even back in the Victorian era, it had its fair share of detractors. In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde famously summed up the English fox hunt, calling it "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
[00:13:09] In other words, all these ridiculous people chasing something that you don't even eat at the end of it.
[00:13:15] The whole thing existed for its own sake; it was pointless.
[00:13:20] By the late nineteenth century, Wilde was not alone in finding it strange. A growing number of people, particularly in the cities, were beginning to think that the violent killing of an animal for enjoyment had no place in a civilised country.
[00:13:39] And people started vocally opposing it, calling for it to be banned.
[00:13:46] The first serious organised opposition dates back to 1925.
[00:13:52] In that year, a group of campaigners founded the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, which is today known simply as the League Against Cruel Sports.
[00:14:05] Its early efforts focused on softer popular targets: like hunting rabbits with dogs, hunting otters or stags. These efforts had some success, and laid the groundwork for the idea that fox hunting wasn't untouchable.
[00:14:22] But it would take another generation for that idea to translate into direct action.
[00:14:31] In 1958, members of the League laid false scent trails to disrupt a stag hunt in the West Country.
[00:14:41] In other words, they put fake smells that would trick and confuse the hunting dogs, committing the first modern act of "hunt sabotage". This proved to be very effective, and groups sprang up throughout the country, groups that became known as "sabs", short for saboteurs.
[00:15:03] They would arrive at hunting meets with horns, whistles, and bottles of false scent. They would try to confuse the hounds, distract the huntsmen, and steer the hunt away from any actual fox.
[00:15:19] In response, the hunts would close ranks, push the saboteurs away, and complain to the police about people trespassing on private property.
[00:15:30] On bad days, the two sides came to blows. People were injured. In the 1990s, two saboteurs were killed while trying to prevent a hunt.
[00:15:44] Meanwhile, public opinion was shifting. By the 1990s, opinion polls regularly showed that a clear majority of British people wanted hunting with hounds banned.
[00:16:01] And in 1997, Tony Blair and Labour won a landslide general election. Although it was only a small part of the manifesto, Labour had promised to hold a vote on whether hunting with dogs should be banned.
[00:16:17] But... nothing happened.
[00:16:20] The fox hunting question sat there for the next seven years, without anything being done.
[00:16:28] In those years, the hunting debate became one of the most unusual political battles in modern British history.
[00:16:37] On the surface, it was about something that affected almost nobody's daily life. It was an incredibly niche activity, with a tiny fraction of the population doing it.
[00:16:51] And yet it produced more parliamentary debate, more political anger, and more street protest than most other domestic issues of the time.
[00:17:01] As to the question of why, well, it was partly because it had become a stand-in for a much bigger argument about rural and urban Britain.
[00:17:14] To many in the countryside, where hunting was more broadly supported, the proposed ban felt like a city-based government attacking a way of life it did not understand, and interfering in a tradition that didn't affect them.
[00:17:32] They argued that hunting was not simply a hobby for aristocrats. They said it supported rural jobs, helped manage fox numbers, kept hounds and horses in work, and formed part of the social fabric of village life.
[00:17:50] In 2002, there was a huge demonstration through London, with four hundred thousand people descending on the capital in support of hunting. At the time, it was one of the largest political demonstrations London had ever seen.
[00:18:10] And the demonstration was not really just about hunting. It was about everything that rural Britain felt the new government was getting wrong: rules on shooting, the closure of village post offices, falling farm incomes, the broad and bitter sense of being looked down on by a metropolitan political class that did not understand country life.
[00:18:35] And to many in the cities, fox hunting simply had no reason to exist. It was unnecessarily cruel, terrifying a fox into running for its life until it grew tired and was ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. This simply shouldn't be legal in a civilised society, they said.
[00:18:59] Various bills came forward, were debated, were amended, and were sent back to be debated again. The House of Commons had a huge Labour majority. It voted again and again for a total ban. The House of Lords had many hunt sympathisers, and it blocked the bills every time.
[00:19:22] And by the way, if you'd like to learn more about what that all means, and how the British political system works, I'd recommend episode number 592, as that goes into all of that in great detail.
[00:19:36] Eventually, in 2004, the government did something it almost never does.
[00:19:44] It invoked a mechanism that allows the House of Commons to overrule the House of Lords and pass a bill without their consent. The Hunting Act was only the seventh piece of legislation in nearly a century to be passed in this way.
[00:20:03] The Act made it illegal to hunt wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales, with a small number of narrow exemptions, mostly for pest control.
[00:20:15] It came into force on the 18th of February 2005.
[00:20:21] Fox hunting was, for the first time in history, illegal.
[00:20:27] But if you had thought this would have meant the hunts would have stopped, no no.
[00:20:33] The morning after the ban came into force, the hunts went out as usual. Their message was clear: the tradition would continue.
[00:20:45] Technically, what they did was something new. It was "trail hunting".
[00:20:51] A scent was laid in advance along a route across the countryside, typically the urine of a fox.
[00:20:58] The hounds were then released to follow the scent.
[00:21:03] The horses, the red coats, the horn, the meet, the stirrup cup: all of it carried on as before.
[00:21:10] In theory, the chase was now only after a trail, an artificially laid smell.
[00:21:18] And if a real fox happened to be in the way and the hounds chased it down, well, that was an unfortunate accident.
[00:21:27] Critics were not convinced. It was a ruse, they said. Trail hunting was simply fox hunting by a different name. Anti-hunting groups stepped up the pressure, monitoring hunts, filming them, and reporting incidents where they believed a real fox had been killed.
[00:21:48] Even the police were blunt about it. A senior officer described trail hunting as, and I'm quoting directly here, a "smokescreen" that "gives people the opportunity to carry on hunting, as they always said they would when the ban came in twenty years ago".
[00:22:07] There were prosecutions; people taken to court and convicted, but the punishments were typically light: a fine of a few hundred pounds or a police caution.
[00:22:20] For nearly two decades, then, the hunts, or rather the trail hunts, continued in this way.
[00:22:27] That was, until earlier this year.
[00:22:31] In March 2026, the British government announced that trail hunting itself was to be banned.
[00:22:40] It was a commitment in the Labour government's manifesto. And on the 26th of March, the Animal Welfare Minister, Baroness Sue Hayman, opened a public consultation on exactly how to bring the new ban into force.
[00:22:57] As of the time of recording, the findings haven't been published, but the loophole that has kept fox hunting alive for twenty years looks highly likely to be closed.
[00:23:09] It is bad news for the men in red coats.
[00:23:13] But if you are a fox, it might just be very good news indeed.
[00:23:20] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on fox hunting, the second of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions. Next up, in the third and final part of the mini-series, it'll be the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:23:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:39] What do you think about fox hunting? Are there similar traditions in your country, and what does the future have in store for them?
[00:23:47] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is the second part of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions.
[00:00:29] In part one, we looked at Punch and Judy, the strange puppet show that became one of the most recognisable traditions of the British seaside. In part three, next up, we'll be zooming in on the seaside itself, and talking about the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:00:49] But in today's episode, part two, we are talking about something completely different.
[00:00:55] It's more violent, more controversial, and also illegal.
[00:01:00] And that is fox hunting.
[00:01:02] This is not just a story about whether British people like foxes. It is a story about social class, the city vs the countryside and where to draw the line between preserving tradition and tolerating unnecessary cruelty.
[00:01:20] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:26] In 1981, Disney released a film called the Fox and the Hound. It told the story of an unlikely friendship between a fox and a dog, following them from when they were young puppies playing together, to the realisation that they were being brought up to be enemies.
[00:01:48] It was the most expensive animated film ever made at that point, and, as it was a Disney film for kids, everything ended well. Nobody really gets hurt, and everyone lives happily ever after.
[00:02:04] Forty-five years later, another fox-and-hound story is still played out in dozens of villages across the English countryside. But this version is much darker.
[00:02:19] It starts happily enough, with a crowd of people gathered in a field or outside a pub, most on horseback.
[00:02:29] They wear black or red coats, white breeches, and polished black boots. The smell of horses is in the air. There is a pack of forty or fifty dogs milling around. A glass of port, strong, fortified wine, is handed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:02:50] The steam of breath on cold winter air. A horn sounds, and the humans, dogs and horses thunder off across the muddy fields.
[00:03:03] You might think it all sounds perfectly harmless so far.
[00:03:07] What happens next is not so harmless.
[00:03:11] The dogs, all being well, will pick up the scent of a fox. They will relentlessly follow the scent, chasing the fox across fields, ditches and woods, until it cannot run any more. The pack of dogs will then pounce on the fox, ripping it to pieces.
[00:03:32] It is no fairytale ending. It is also illegal, and has been for more than twenty years.
[00:03:40] So, why is it still tacitly allowed, where does it all come from, and why do some people resist the government's attempts to restrict it so fiercely?
[00:03:53] To answer those questions, we have to go back several hundred years.
[00:03:58] Now, foxes have always been a nuisance to farmers. They sneak in during the night and kill their chickens. They kill lambs in the lambing season.
[00:04:10] They are clever, hard to trap, and prolific, in other words, there are lots of them.
[00:04:17] So, for as long as people have been keeping livestock in the British Isles, they have been killing foxes. This killing was, for the most part, practical; farmers, gamekeepers, and shepherds did it with traps, with poison, and with packs of dogs. It was pest control, not "sport".
[00:04:41] And in any case, for most of the medieval and early modern period, hunting for sport, for enjoyment, was the preserve of the aristocracy, those at the top of society.
[00:04:56] And the beast you hunted was deer.
[00:05:01] Kings, dukes, and aristocrats kept enormous private deer parks, and to hunt a stag, the male deer, was the privilege of the elite.
[00:05:14] The fox, by comparison, was vermin. Hunting a lowly fox was something a farmer might do to protect his sheep or chickens.
[00:05:24] Hunting a majestic stag was something a king did.
[00:05:29] This all started to change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it changed because of two things.
[00:05:38] The first was that the deer population started to collapse.
[00:05:43] Centuries of hunting meant that by 1700 or so, the great deer herds of medieval England were largely gone; the aristocrats had killed most of them.
[00:05:55] The second change was the landscape itself. England used to be full of forests and woods, which provided the natural habitat for deer.
[00:06:07] Much of this had been cut down to make way for agricultural land, for fields. And then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was something called enclosure, and this transformed the English countryside one step further.
[00:06:25] What this meant was that these big open fields were divided into smaller patches of farmland, divided by neat hedgerows and ditches.
[00:06:38] This just so happened to be almost perfect terrain for a different kind of hunt. A hunt that involved galloping flat-out across country, jumping over hedges and streams, and following a fast-running animal across miles of open ground.
[00:06:57] And that animal was the fox.
[00:07:02] There was one more thing in the fox's favour, at least from the hunter's point of view.
[00:07:08] A female deer, or a doe, typically has between one and three babies per year. A female fox, or a vixen, will typically produce four or five babies, or cubs, every spring. And in some cases, many more, sometimes ten or more.
[00:07:29] What this meant was that a hunt could ride out every Saturday of the season, kill a fox each time, and the fox population would scarcely notice.
[00:07:41] To the huntsman, this made the fox both a worthy adversary and effectively unlimited in supply.
[00:07:52] Now, fox hunting in its modern form is traditionally credited to one man: a Leicestershire landowner named Hugo Meynell.
[00:08:04] In 1753, at the age of eighteen, Meynell took over a pack of hounds at Quorndon Hall, and over the next half-century he supposedly transformed fox hunting.
[00:08:18] He bred faster, more athletic hounds. He trained them to follow the scent of a fox at speed. He pioneered the kind of long, hard, cross-country chase that became the model for every hunt that followed.
[00:08:36] Now, some modern historians have pushed back a little on this story, saying that the neat tale of Meynell as the lone genius who invented fox hunting is probably a little exaggerated.
[00:08:49] Whether it was Meynell alone, or whether he simply became the face of something that was already happening all over the country, it doesn't really matter for the purposes of our story.
[00:09:01] The important thing to understand is that by the early 1800s the basic shape of the thing we now call fox hunting was in place.
[00:09:12] And by the time we get to the Victorian era, the hunt had become something much more than a country pursuit.
[00:09:21] It had become an institution.
[00:09:26] Each hunt had a defined territory, sometimes covering several counties.
[00:09:32] Each had a Master of Foxhounds, who was the senior figure, often a wealthy local landowner.
[00:09:41] Each had a professional staff in charge of the dogs and horses.
[00:09:46] The hunt had its own kennels, its own stables, its own subscription system, even its own dinner club.
[00:09:55] It also had its own clothing. Senior figures wore a scarlet coat, which, for reasons no one can quite agree on, is traditionally called "hunting pink".
[00:10:09] Most riders wore black or navy.
[00:10:13] Fox hunting also had its own vocabulary. Foxes were not called male and female. They were dog foxes and vixens. The fox's tail was a brush.
[00:10:28] The animals chasing the fox were never called dogs.
[00:10:31] They were a pack of hounds, with names and ranks.
[00:10:36] The huntsman did not call them with a whistle. He called them with a horn and with hunting cries like "tally-ho" and "gone away".
[00:10:47] The hunt also had its own ritual. The meet, where the hunt gathered, which was usually in front of a village pub or a country house.
[00:10:57] The stirrup cup, which is the small glass of port or cherry brandy passed up to each rider in the saddle.
[00:11:06] The blessing of the hounds. The blowing of the horn. The first cast across a field, meaning the first time the hounds were sent out across a field to try to catch the scent of a fox.
[00:11:19] And it could be a long day too.
[00:11:22] A day's hunting, from start to finish, could last six or seven hours. The hounds would be sent out across a field, picking up the scent of a fox.
[00:11:33] The hunt would gallop after them, often for miles, over hedges and ditches and walls. Riders would fall. Horses would go lame. A fox might be killed at the end of it, or might escape into a wood or down a drain.
[00:11:51] Then the hunt would move on to a new patch of country and start again. By the end of the afternoon the riders would be cold, tired and muddy. They would get off the horses, perhaps gather back at the pub, eat, drink, and tell stories about the day.
[00:12:12] And hunting was not an activity for everyone; fox hunting was overwhelmingly an upper-class and rural-middle-class pursuit. A subscription to a hunt was expensive. The horse, the kit, the time off work mid-week or on a Saturday: all of it cost money.
[00:12:33] Farmers were welcomed, because the hunt rode across their land. But the masters of foxhounds, the people who actually ran the hunts, these were almost always the people who owned the big country houses and the fields around them.
[00:12:50] Now, even back in the Victorian era, it had its fair share of detractors. In the 1890s, Oscar Wilde famously summed up the English fox hunt, calling it "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".
[00:13:09] In other words, all these ridiculous people chasing something that you don't even eat at the end of it.
[00:13:15] The whole thing existed for its own sake; it was pointless.
[00:13:20] By the late nineteenth century, Wilde was not alone in finding it strange. A growing number of people, particularly in the cities, were beginning to think that the violent killing of an animal for enjoyment had no place in a civilised country.
[00:13:39] And people started vocally opposing it, calling for it to be banned.
[00:13:46] The first serious organised opposition dates back to 1925.
[00:13:52] In that year, a group of campaigners founded the League for the Prohibition of Cruel Sports, which is today known simply as the League Against Cruel Sports.
[00:14:05] Its early efforts focused on softer popular targets: like hunting rabbits with dogs, hunting otters or stags. These efforts had some success, and laid the groundwork for the idea that fox hunting wasn't untouchable.
[00:14:22] But it would take another generation for that idea to translate into direct action.
[00:14:31] In 1958, members of the League laid false scent trails to disrupt a stag hunt in the West Country.
[00:14:41] In other words, they put fake smells that would trick and confuse the hunting dogs, committing the first modern act of "hunt sabotage". This proved to be very effective, and groups sprang up throughout the country, groups that became known as "sabs", short for saboteurs.
[00:15:03] They would arrive at hunting meets with horns, whistles, and bottles of false scent. They would try to confuse the hounds, distract the huntsmen, and steer the hunt away from any actual fox.
[00:15:19] In response, the hunts would close ranks, push the saboteurs away, and complain to the police about people trespassing on private property.
[00:15:30] On bad days, the two sides came to blows. People were injured. In the 1990s, two saboteurs were killed while trying to prevent a hunt.
[00:15:44] Meanwhile, public opinion was shifting. By the 1990s, opinion polls regularly showed that a clear majority of British people wanted hunting with hounds banned.
[00:16:01] And in 1997, Tony Blair and Labour won a landslide general election. Although it was only a small part of the manifesto, Labour had promised to hold a vote on whether hunting with dogs should be banned.
[00:16:17] But... nothing happened.
[00:16:20] The fox hunting question sat there for the next seven years, without anything being done.
[00:16:28] In those years, the hunting debate became one of the most unusual political battles in modern British history.
[00:16:37] On the surface, it was about something that affected almost nobody's daily life. It was an incredibly niche activity, with a tiny fraction of the population doing it.
[00:16:51] And yet it produced more parliamentary debate, more political anger, and more street protest than most other domestic issues of the time.
[00:17:01] As to the question of why, well, it was partly because it had become a stand-in for a much bigger argument about rural and urban Britain.
[00:17:14] To many in the countryside, where hunting was more broadly supported, the proposed ban felt like a city-based government attacking a way of life it did not understand, and interfering in a tradition that didn't affect them.
[00:17:32] They argued that hunting was not simply a hobby for aristocrats. They said it supported rural jobs, helped manage fox numbers, kept hounds and horses in work, and formed part of the social fabric of village life.
[00:17:50] In 2002, there was a huge demonstration through London, with four hundred thousand people descending on the capital in support of hunting. At the time, it was one of the largest political demonstrations London had ever seen.
[00:18:10] And the demonstration was not really just about hunting. It was about everything that rural Britain felt the new government was getting wrong: rules on shooting, the closure of village post offices, falling farm incomes, the broad and bitter sense of being looked down on by a metropolitan political class that did not understand country life.
[00:18:35] And to many in the cities, fox hunting simply had no reason to exist. It was unnecessarily cruel, terrifying a fox into running for its life until it grew tired and was ripped to shreds by a pack of dogs. This simply shouldn't be legal in a civilised society, they said.
[00:18:59] Various bills came forward, were debated, were amended, and were sent back to be debated again. The House of Commons had a huge Labour majority. It voted again and again for a total ban. The House of Lords had many hunt sympathisers, and it blocked the bills every time.
[00:19:22] And by the way, if you'd like to learn more about what that all means, and how the British political system works, I'd recommend episode number 592, as that goes into all of that in great detail.
[00:19:36] Eventually, in 2004, the government did something it almost never does.
[00:19:44] It invoked a mechanism that allows the House of Commons to overrule the House of Lords and pass a bill without their consent. The Hunting Act was only the seventh piece of legislation in nearly a century to be passed in this way.
[00:20:03] The Act made it illegal to hunt wild mammals with dogs in England and Wales, with a small number of narrow exemptions, mostly for pest control.
[00:20:15] It came into force on the 18th of February 2005.
[00:20:21] Fox hunting was, for the first time in history, illegal.
[00:20:27] But if you had thought this would have meant the hunts would have stopped, no no.
[00:20:33] The morning after the ban came into force, the hunts went out as usual. Their message was clear: the tradition would continue.
[00:20:45] Technically, what they did was something new. It was "trail hunting".
[00:20:51] A scent was laid in advance along a route across the countryside, typically the urine of a fox.
[00:20:58] The hounds were then released to follow the scent.
[00:21:03] The horses, the red coats, the horn, the meet, the stirrup cup: all of it carried on as before.
[00:21:10] In theory, the chase was now only after a trail, an artificially laid smell.
[00:21:18] And if a real fox happened to be in the way and the hounds chased it down, well, that was an unfortunate accident.
[00:21:27] Critics were not convinced. It was a ruse, they said. Trail hunting was simply fox hunting by a different name. Anti-hunting groups stepped up the pressure, monitoring hunts, filming them, and reporting incidents where they believed a real fox had been killed.
[00:21:48] Even the police were blunt about it. A senior officer described trail hunting as, and I'm quoting directly here, a "smokescreen" that "gives people the opportunity to carry on hunting, as they always said they would when the ban came in twenty years ago".
[00:22:07] There were prosecutions; people taken to court and convicted, but the punishments were typically light: a fine of a few hundred pounds or a police caution.
[00:22:20] For nearly two decades, then, the hunts, or rather the trail hunts, continued in this way.
[00:22:27] That was, until earlier this year.
[00:22:31] In March 2026, the British government announced that trail hunting itself was to be banned.
[00:22:40] It was a commitment in the Labour government's manifesto. And on the 26th of March, the Animal Welfare Minister, Baroness Sue Hayman, opened a public consultation on exactly how to bring the new ban into force.
[00:22:57] As of the time of recording, the findings haven't been published, but the loophole that has kept fox hunting alive for twenty years looks highly likely to be closed.
[00:23:09] It is bad news for the men in red coats.
[00:23:13] But if you are a fox, it might just be very good news indeed.
[00:23:20] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on fox hunting, the second of our three-part mini-series on unusual British traditions. Next up, in the third and final part of the mini-series, it'll be the rise and fall of the British seaside holiday.
[00:23:36] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:23:39] What do you think about fox hunting? Are there similar traditions in your country, and what does the future have in store for them?
[00:23:47] I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:23:59] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:24:04] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
