Calling Off The Hounds

By Andrew Sullivan

I feel about foxhunting the way I do about smoking. I wouldn't do it myself, but as long as no one's brandishing his lifestyle in my living room, why should I care? The British, by and large, have long taken this view of odd behavior, which is why my homeland is still a relatively free and often eccentric place. "The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable" was Oscar Wilde's timeless description of the hunt scene, and it is impossible, as always, to better Wilde. If a bunch of aristocrats want to get dressed up in pink suits and silly hats, surround themselves with packs of beagles and go cavorting around the English countryside blowing horns, trashing hedges and chasing foxes, then who am I to stand in their way?

Alas, this easygoing tolerance suffered a heavy blow last week. In a parliamentary vote, Prime Minister Tony Blair's massed ranks of Labour Party deputies voted to ban the practice outright. It isn't the law yet--the House of Lords (another eccentric English institution) and the Queen (who was recently photographed strangling a wounded pheasant) must eventually give their consent. But the Queen and her Lordships have about as much clout in Cool Britannia as foxhunters and retired generals. Centuries of English rural loopiness will therefore shortly join the ranks of extinguished British institutions, like red telephone boxes, farthings and large, expensive empires.

The official reason is squeamishness about the fate of the foxes. No principle is dearer to the English than the protection of animals, especially cute, furry ones. In a priceless understatement, a recent commission report on the practice concluded that the experience of being torn limb from limb by a pack of hounds "seriously compromises the welfare of the fox." But as the spirited parliamentary debate revealed, this principle is as slippery as a wet fox in a rabbit hole.

For no one doubts that without foxhunting, farmers will still need to keep the fox population under control. When they're not being adorable, foxes have a habit of invading farms and killing all sorts of other furry and feathery friends. So the farmers will be required to go out and shoot them instead, a means of execution less colorful but no less cruel than beagle munching. Without foxhunting, moreover, thousands of hounds will have to be euthanized, their reason for existence as evanescent as the morning mist in Shropshire. All the foxhunters need to do is film the mass killing of beagles to send the Brits into a Humane Society whiplash.

What actually lies behind the desire to ban foxhunting is something as old and as English as the love of animals: class war. For generations, land-owning toffs have used foxhunting as a means to socialize among their peers and look down (literally) on the peasants below. Banning foxhunting has therefore been a dream of English class warriors for years. It taps deep veins of resentment that Blair is keen to exploit as he gears up for a spring election. Like the New Democrats, New Labourites are worried that their co-opting of many conservative themes has offered their constituency very little enticement. Sure, Blair has an easy lead in the polls, but that could vanish if turnout is low, since the Tory base is as angry as Labour's is indifferent. So just as Al Gore ran hard to his left in last year's presidential campaign, so Blair is desperate to galvanize working-class supporters. A good bashing of the aristocracy is just what the pollster ordered.

But it comes with a price. Like the U.S., Britain is seeing a slow but deep political division between its urban and rural populations. The Tories have always done well in the countryside, but their rural support is cresting. Last year the protests against the ban on foxhunting brought more demonstrators to the streets of London than any since the riots against Margaret Thatcher's attempt to impose a poll tax. The farmers, landowners and rural workers are incensed at what they see, with good reason, as an attack on their way of life.

At stake, especially now, is the very identity of the country. The Brits are a flexible lot, but in a very short space of time, they have seen a large amount of their heritage disappear. At the same time that the Blair government is banning foxhunting, it's also banning the use of nonmetric measurements, like feet, inches, miles and gallons, in favor of European measurements that most Brits abhor. Blair has reformed the House of Lords to gut it of its historical privileges. He is busy merging the British armed services into a pan-European force. After the next election, he is all but committed to abolishing the pound sterling in favor of the euro.

At some point, the resistance to all this will surely reach a tipping point, and it will be a sublime piece of cultural irony if foxhunting is what does it. But if you think of what a country means, as George Orwell once wrote, it isn't an idea. It's familiar things, practices, habits: heavy coins, warm beer, monarchs and frightened foxes. There will always be an England, we reassure ourselves. But some Brits are beginning to worry that unless they stand up and do something--maybe sooner rather than later--there won't be.

Andrew Sullivan writes for the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine and andrewsullivan.com