What is Britain without the hunt? (National Post, September 22, 2004)

Last week, Britain's House of Commons adopted legislation to ban fox hunting in England and Wales in 2006. (It is already banned in Scotland.) The Queen is not amused, but polls indicate most Britons favour special legislation that would stop the House of Lords from blocking the ban. The faint rumble of the tumbrils from London makes stirrup cups tremble in Wiltshire. How long before "Tally ho!" falls victim to the linguistic guillotine and the oubliette of cultural history?

To most of us, the ban is neither earth-shattering nor unwelcome. Few Canadians understand the appeal of fox hunting, nor any blood sport at all. But in England, riding to hounds is more than a rich man's sport. These vestigial pink-jacketed militias are a defining signifier of imperial power and territorial domination.

For French aristocrats, Paris was the centre of the universe, and the Court the cynosure of all ambitions. The English aristocracy -- more powerful and independent, less influenced in their behaviours by the Court of St. James -- chose the countryside as their heart's domain. An aristocrat had his great house in London, of course, but his home and his real life were in the countryside.

Along with an aversion to intellectual activity, a passion for horses and dogs has always provided the foundation for true contentment in English country living, and by extension, a sine qua non for fitting into the aristocratic template exemplified by the Royal Family. Polo, eventing, steeplechasing and racing all make their various claims on individual members, but fox hunting is the unifying tribal glue.

Princess Diana's tragic flaws were her indifference to horses and her preference for urban over country life. Had she, like Camilla, enjoyed the pleasures of "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable," her life probably would have been long, happy and fulfilled.

For hunting represents brahmin social capital. The bluebloods' political influence may be fading, but they retain their social hegemony of old. (As proof, read the recently published, deliciously amusing Snobs by Julian Fellowes.) The twice weekly hunts are where the property nexus is cemented and reaffirmed through social and marital alliances. Any reader of British fiction knows that a "gel" remarked as having a good seat on a horse will soon acquire the most desirable titled bachelor.

But most of these novels treat fox hunting as jolly, festive affairs and the hunters as amiable or eccentric stock figures. For the franker, darker cultural aspects of hunting, you must read the magnificent (and criminally underappreciated) writer Molly Keane.

Keane grew up in the Anglo-Irish "raj," when Ireland was colonized by arrogant English landowners like her father, whose obsessions were horses and riding to hounds. All her early books, (written under the pseudonym of M.J. Farrell) revolve around the hunt as the epicentre of social life. No child, no matter how bored or terrified, was excused from riding, and nobody describes children's fear better than Keane. "It was extraordinary," she recalls, "at dinner, people would tell about some incident involving a small child shrinking at a wall, blue with terror, or taking it clinging on for dear life as if it were the most amusing thing."

In Keane's books, the passion for hunting is revealed as an obsession bordering on mania. Horses are privileged over humans. Parents completely ignore their children except to watch them ride their ponies. Keane remembers her brother hiding a poetry anthology inside his pony club manual -- the only sanctioned reading matter for children -- to evade his father's philistine contempt.

In one of Keane's novels, a young husband asks his wife to have an abortion so he can afford to pay his hunt club bills (she does). In another, a beautiful young woman turns down a brainy, ambitious, but non-riding suitor in favour of a horse-loving cad, and ruins her life. A father crippled in a fall abandons his family through suicide, as life without fox hunting is intolerable. Houses crumble, unmaintained, so that dwindling revenues can be spent on acquiring new horses.

The English passion for horses has no Canadian counterpart, but perhaps may be compared to the culturally entrenched American love of guns. Mirroring the conflicted British attitude to fox hunting, millions of Americans actually loathe firearms, and see them as an archaic vestige of a more primitive time. Yet the issue has been debated to a decision in Britain, while in America few politicians dare set foot in the quicksand of gun control. In the United States, a nation created through revolution, government encroachments on the right to bear arms is a dog that just won't hunt.

© National Post 2004