“We can confirm that this group will not be stewarding at Glastonbury in the future, and that we have fully vetted our list of stewarding groups to ensure that there are no other hunting organisations represented on it.”

Excellent news as fox hunting takes yet another hit. Glastonbury Festival has scrambled to respond to an avalanche of adverse comments on social media by no longer employing members of the notorious Mendip Farmers Hunt as stewards, who in the past had been working alongside (presumably unknowing) teams from Oxfam and Greenpeace.

The link with Glastonbury – which has always sold itself as ‘green’ despite founder Michael Eavis’s well-documented support for the badger cull – was detailed by campaigner Innocent Badger after a member of the hunt lost a memory stick which included details of all current hunt members and its financial statements. The fees previously paid to the hunt stewards by the festival had effectively been subsidising the hunt itself. As meeting minutes also found on the memory stick show, the Hunt is in a financially poor (hopefully terminal) state and was already lamenting the loss of income the pandemic was causing them, a situation that all hunts must be facing as more and more ‘dates’ are cancelled and riding out fees lost.

The Mendip Farmers Hunt, which includes the ludicrous Jacob Rees-Mogg amongst its members, range over a huge area, hunting foxes during “wide open days on the flat Somerset levels to our famous stone wall country on the Mendip Hills”. They are monitored by many sabs groups including the Mendip Hunt Sabs, “a group of Hunt Sabs dedicated to protecting wildlife from local hunts and preventing wildlife persecution in the Mendips area and beyond“, who also cover the South Dorset Hunt and regularly write about the ‘shenanigans’ that these lovely people get up to on their website: MENDIP HUNT SABS.

It’s worth remembering that it’s down to the work of brave sabs like these that has led to Glastonbury’s decision – without the evidence of criminality, aggression, and violence that sabs and monitors have documented over the years there would have been no reason for Glastonbury to ban these thugs from their festival.

Glastonbury Festival bans hunt from fundraising on site

Glastonbury Festival says it is “absolutely not pro-hunting” and has moved swiftly to ban a hunt from fundraising activities on its site.

The move by the festival follows release of minutes from a meeting of the Mendip Farmers Hunt in Somerset in which the hunt said one reason for their “poor financial state“ was the loss of income from providing stewards when the festival was postponed in 2020.

The minutes were revealed by an anti-badger cull organisation Innocent Badger and the festival claim they had no idea the hunt had been using their event to raise much needed funds.

Glastonbury Festival employs thousands of stewards each year across its vast site. They “mostly come from local PTAs, sports groups and carnival clubs… are recruited by a team of steward coordinators… with these organisations benefiting from the fees paid to the stewards”.

The festival which is held on a farm in Somerset told ITV News: “Glastonbury Festival is absolutely not pro-hunting, and we do not – and would not – donate directly to any hunts.

“It has been brought to our attention that a group of these stewards represented a local hunt.

“We can confirm that this group will not be stewarding at Glastonbury in the future, and that we have fully vetted our list of stewarding groups to ensure that there are no other hunting organisations represented on it.”

Rupert Evelyn, ITV News, 14 Jan 21