The sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs makes you long for the good old days

At a recent day’s hunting in Wiltshire, a man in a balaclava trying to pull a rider off his horse and said, ‘Some of you will be going home in body bags today’. Later, after the huntsman had put his horse and hounds in the lorry, masked men armed with iron bars set upon him and knocked him out, kicking him repeatedly in the head as hard as they could even after he was unconscious. It’s 10 years since the hunting ban came into force but the sadistic sport of the hunt saboteurs is as popular, and as vicious, as ever. It makes you long for the old days; in 1900, when the army reserves, as well as an awful lot of horses, were heading off to fight in the Boer War, most hunts continued just as they always had:

If the fields are smaller than usual, and a good many familiar faces are missing, the master very properly feels that as he has his pack and there are plenty of foxes, he may as well employ the one and hunt the other, and keep up the spirits of the county by good sound sport and plenty of it. Masters