Two charged after fox killed during New Year hunt in East Yorkshire

It’s not that we’re deliberately looking for stories linking Yorkshire with wildlife crime, it’s more that they just keep turning up. When it’s not the region’s gamekeepers shooting or poisoning birds of prey, it seems that its so-called ‘trail hunting’ fox hunters can’t help breaking the law either (take note National Trust, you allow fox hunting on your land this is the almost inevitable result).

As a report in the Hull Daily Mail puts it rather prosaically, “Two men have been charged after allegedly allowing dogs to hunt a fox in East Yorkshire“. Which might sound rather harmless in some quarters (after all, aren’t illegal hunts just tidying up the countryside on behalf of shooters and farmers, which is what they endlessly claim?), but it’s interesting to note that the photo the journal used (and which we’ve replicated in the header) has been ‘blurred’ to hide the facts: when dogs get hold of foxes they usually ‘rag’ them, tearing them apart and/or biting chunks into their soft underbellies.

It’s a shame really that the photo editor felt that the audience needed shielding from the brutal reality of fox hunting ((at least we assume this is the case, it usually is in our experience). Of course most people (lawbreaking fox hunters aside) don’t want to see a fox’s guts with their breakfast cuppa, but then decent people don’t want illegal hunting to cause fox guts to spill out of their bodies either. And until we face up to the realities of these damnable ‘traditions’ the cycle of excuses, law-breaking, and ‘looking the other way’ will just continue – and not just in Yorkshire…

Having said that, it takes a huge effort to get fox hunters to court, so kudos to Humberside Police – particularly any of the force who work fighting wildlife crime: they must be some of the busiest police officers in England.

 

Hull Daily Mail, 15th July 2020 by Sophie Corcoran

Two men have been charged after allegedly allowing dogs to hunt a fox in East Yorkshire.

Christopher Richardson, 72, of Bridlington Road in Brandesburton, and Charles Clark, 39, of Garman Carr Lane in Selby, have been charged under the 2004 Hunting Act.

The charges come after a police investigation in January this year into a hunt on New Year’s Eve 2019.

At the time, a spokeswoman for Humberside Police said: “Enquiries are being carried out after a report was received from a member of the public that a fox had been killed by dogs, believed to be part of a hunt, on New Year’s Eve in Driffield.

“Officers from the wildlife crime team attended the Hempholme area at around 12.50pm on the day.”

Both Mr Richardson and Mr Clark will appear at Hull Magistrates’ Court on Thursday, August 27.

A spokeswoman for Humberside Police said: “Following an investigation into the death of a fox during a hunt on December 31 2019, in which it was reported that dogs had been allowed to hunt foxes, two men have now been charged under the 2004 Hunting Act.

We want to reassure our communities that we will not tolerate anyone committing crimes against our protected wildlife and take these matters extremely seriously.”