Tag: hunt saboteurs

Sabs are heroes. End of

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A couple of days ago we wrote about the incredibly brave Manchester Hunt Saboteur who had come across a gang of badger baiters with two dogs digging a sett that he regularly monitored. He was attacked and severely beaten. The baiters left him for dead. Remarkably he survived, but his injuries were appalling and he will be scarred for life. Many of us would want to disappear after an event like that, to hide away and recover. Incredibly this remarkable human being is already back out and installing remote cameras. In an open letter he talks about how he can’t rest while there is so much more to do, about the relentless persecution our precious wildlife faces. Hunt saboteurs are hugely misunderstood. The truth is that they out in the countryside to tackle and prevent wildlife crime. The truth is that sabs are heroes. End of.

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Sab attacked by badger baiters

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Badger baiters are amongst the nastiest and most vicious of thugs, with zero respect for life. A member of Manchester Hunt Saboteurs was attacked by five badger baiters near Little Lever, Bolton last night after checking on a sett. He was beaten unconscious and – literally – left for dead. His injuries are extremely serious. He needed forty-two stitches in his head, and will need plastic surgery on his ear. The Police have been to take statements from him and are pursuing this as both a Section 18 assault (GBH), and crimes against the Badger Protection Act.

A crowdfunder has been set up to support him whle he is off work. Please consider donating.

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Fitzwilliam Hunt ‘sorry’ for wrecking funeral

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Here’s a headline for all hunt supporters, all hunt apologists, for all hunt lobbyists and for all pro-hunt MPs who continue to tell us constituents that hunts only go ‘trail hunting’ – “Fitzwilliam Hunt apologises after funeral ceremony disturbed by “20 to 30″ hounds”. How the hell do you explain that away? In a year that has seen such tragedy, such loss of life, so many communities turned upside down and inside out, so many families separated, so much grief, how do you explain away the notorious Fitzwilliam Hunt (who have an open invitation to ‘Come Hunting’ on their homepage), losing control of their hounds and allowing them to run through a crematorium as mourners were trying to cope with the loss of a loved one? What possible excuse can you come up for this?

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Covid Tier 4 | Terrible for people, not so bad for wildlife

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The new Covid Tier 4 restrictions are terrible for some people, but not so bad for wildlife. We’re not in any way making light of the restrictions placed on so many people this week by the spread of the coronavirus variant (many of our colleagues and friends are affected too of course), but while the full impacts of the newly-announced ‘stay at home’ Tier 4 restrictions (which seem likely to be followed by a national lockdown in January after super-spreaders arrive back home post-Christmas travel) are yet to be fully understood, we were inspired by a joyful tweet by Beds & Bucks Hunt Sabs this morning (which we’ve copied below) and we thought – in an ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ moment – we’d post what we do know so far…

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Renfrewshire Council chiefs urged to reaffirm opposition to fox hunting

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The fall out from the leaked Hunting Office webinars has crossed the border into Scotland, with a report in today’s Daily Record quoting Renfrewshire Council’s elected member Audrey Doig asking the local authority to “reaffirm its position that no fox hunting activities will be allowed to occur on any land or property owned or managed by Renfrewshire Council”. Fox hunting is of course illegal in Scotland. It was banned under the Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act 2002, but as the campaigning charity One Kind points out, “Before the ban in 2002 there were ten operational mounted fox hunts in Scotland. There are still ten today. According to the hunts themselves, they kill about 800 foxes every year.” One of those hunts is the notorious Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire Foxhounds. The Glasgow Hunt Sabs regularly report the illegal activities of this hunt on their Facebook page. This includes a savage attack in October this year on a lone hunt monitor by hunt followers (covered in the Daily Record under the headline “Disabled man viciously battered by vile blood sport thugs after he protests at Scots fox hunt”).

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More #trailhuntlies – this time it’s in the national media

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Several activists (including ourselves) are engaged in a bit of an online ‘debate’ at the moment with the National Trust about their granting of licences to ‘trail hunt’ on their land. Why? Because ‘trail hunting’, as we repeatedly state, is a lie. Thanks to the work of the Manchester Hunt Sabs, the incontrovertible evidence of wildlife crime by the York and Ainsty South Hunt and the disgraceful behaviour by hunt whipper-in Mark Poskitt while ‘trail hunting’ is now saved for posterity in the pages of the Daily Mail Online – and whatever anyone might feel about the Mail’s politics it does have a huge readership, many of whom are avowed ‘animal lovers’…

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Guest post | Sabbing the Un-glorious 12th

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We’ve spent much of this week discussing the start of yet another six months of shooting grouse in the uplands. In one article we posted several images from Twitter uploaded by sabs groups, who appeared to have had a very successful day interrupting the killings. The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) have now posted a full series of images alongside an overview of their support for the various local groups who (in some cases) made long journies up to the moorlands. But what’s it like to sab a shoot? To walk up to armed men to stop them shooting the wild birds they’ve paid to kill? One of the sabs in the Peaks has written a guest post that answers just that…

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