The Christian case for hunting

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends. When he returned, it was with a wind-beaten face, wearing the traditional beagler’s white breeks and green socks, with a leather hunting whip slung over his shoulder. I knew nothing of this world, until one late autumnal Saturday he invited me to join him. As I watched the beagle pack race across the landscape, I realised I had stepped into a magical event, a hunting scene from a medieval tapestry brought to life. I was hooked.

To this day, many sporting Christians throughout Europe honour St Hubert with songs and prayers after a hunt

Beagling was my entry into field sports, but soon the door might be closed to others. The government is committed to outlawing the pursuit of artificial trails with hounds. This attack on what remains of our hunting heritage stems from bigotry, ignorance and muddled emotion, but it’s also bound up with a rejection of our Christian spiritual heritage, without which modern Britons are finding themselves purposeless.

Henry was the only Roman Catholic I knew growing up. His was an old recusant family and his father was a knight of the Order of Malta. Arriving back exhausted from that day’s hunting, Henry and I collapsed on the sofa in his drawing room. Sitting before the hearth and a roaring fire, under a small wooden crucifix and a glorious painting of the Virgin, we discussed the day’s hunt over hand-rolled cigarettes and homemade damson gin. Two things occurred to me then: that Catholics know how to live beautifully, and that Catholics hunt. Only later did it dawn on me that there is a deep connection – not only historical, but spiritual – between Christianity and the chase.