Under the ban, fox hunts can do everything except hunt foxes.
Farmers had a vested interest in killing foxes, which preyed on their livestock; a hobby rider out for an enjoyable day's riding in the autumn sunshine doesn't really care what is being pursued, a fox or a scented rag.
Mawle employed three keepers whose work included controlling predators (foxes, stoats, crows) by legal means to ensure a healthy wild grouse population.
Hunts in Scotland can continue to kill foxes by practising an exemption to the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act called 'flushing to guns', which means using dogs to chase foxes from beneath cover in order to shoot them.
Most of these skills remain unused, although my friend Rodney had a chance to test them when he was cast as a black servant in an end-of-term production of The Little Foxes.
Tally ho, and off he set to shoot Labour foxes.
In the run up to announcing a legislative programme entirely composed of the sort of things the Sheriff of Nottingham would yell at villagers as threats, he had everybody talking about foxes.
There's not a jot of evidence that foxes are any better off as a result of this".
Their job involves eradicating animals that might want to eat these small game birds: foxes, stoats, weasels and, in the days when it was legal to do so, birds of prey.
"There were golden plover and curlew and lapwing displaying and it was pretty impressive but if there had been a pile of 400 stoats by the road and however many foxes and weasels and a pile of illegally killed hedgehogs, badgers, peregrines, goshawks and short-eared owls then the lapwing and curlew don't look quite so impressive.
"These changes would make it extremely difficult for Scottish hunts to use cynical subterfuge to mask packs of hounds being encouraged to chase foxes and eventually kill them".
