Rogering the News

Fishing is a cruel activity.

Fish DO feel pain.

Proven fact.

That is why the utter hypocrisy over the condemnation of fox hunting by the NuLab government and their banning of it was and remains so wrong. If there really was an animal welfare issue then long before fox hunting was even considered sport angling should have been banned.

It serves no purpose, it inflicts great pain on fish and often results in horrible mutilation to their mouths, and what ends up on the bank or in the keep net is inedible unless your taste runs to a mouthful of muddy tasteless flesh and bones.

But did NuLabour go on a mission to condemn let alone ban sport angling? Nah. Too many votes to be lost compared to so many votes to be won by going after what is thought to be a cruel and pointless activity, an activity that is widely misunderstood, almost universally misrepresented, and oh such a cause celebre, fox hunting. No matter that Peter Bradley (ten) MP, the parliamentary private secretary to Alun Michael, who was the rural affairs minister, has let slip that the real reason that Labour MPs feel so strongly about the ban is because it is aimed at killing ‘the old order’.

He continued that is the first time in history that a Labour government has taken on ‘the gentry’.

In short, a matter of the class war on a new battlefield with the victims the innocent bystanders, this time the foxes.

So on those grounds who are responsible for the greatest cruelty in culling a pest?

Those who arrange for the numbers to be kept in check by the culling of the old and the weak in a way that ensures a very rapid death?

Or those who in pursuit of their politics have created a situation where thousands of foxes are now culled by nature in the form of disease and starvation?

Or by being left to slow and agonizing deaths from poisons that will then be released into the environment continuing to kill by being ingested by the eaters of carrion in the foodchain?

Or die agonizing deaths from wounds received from being shot. Keep in mind that to kill a fox outright with a shotgun would requires the fox to be within twenty-five yards and there’s damm few foxes that would allow themselves within fifty yards of anyone.

Much more probable the poor things are wounded and take days to succumb to the wounds from septicemia and or gangrene.

But instead of allowing facts and reality to rule, NuLab instead chose to play to the public imagination of what Fox Hunts are all about. An imagination that in most cases, is about as far from reality as could be.

Rather than go on a crusade against an activity that really IS cruel and pointless they condemned thousands, by now probably hundreds of thousands of highly sentient mammals to lives of starvation, disease, and death from singularly inappropriate means of culling of any population of pests.

And yet, an activity that results in the purchase of specialist clothing, expensive equipment, is oftentimes a social activity with the hunters forming in clubs that compete within the clubs and between clubs to see how many animals can be trapped in a terribly cruel manner simply to see who can catch most, is left untouched.

Because there’s no votes to be won by banning it, in fact just the opposite.

One of the first bit of animal welfare legislation that the incoming government should enact is to get rid of the ban of hunting of foxes with dogs and crack down big time on so called sports angling.

Now that WOULD be a step forward for animal protection and welfare.

For fish, for fowl, — and for fox.

Rog

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.