Horses, holly, and a hard truth trotting through Essex

Image: Knelstrom Media

By Martin Foskett / Dispatches / Knelstrom Media

​I took my better half and the children to a traditional Boxing Day hunt expecting the usual chorus of sighs and phone-glazing, only to watch boredom fold neatly into astonishment as the spectacle unfolded: scarlet coats, steaming horses, brass buttons catching the winter light, and a village green momentarily upgraded to something operatic.

​The meet was the annual Boxing Day gathering at Matching Green, with the Puckeridge Hunt and the Essex Hunt turning out in force. Eighty-six mounted riders by the count of someone who looked as if they counted things for pleasure, and five hundred-plus followers on foot, thermoses, tweed, dogs on leads, children orbiting the biscuit tins like moths. The hunt circled the green twice, a courteous lap of honour for the village and the season, before sliding off towards the fields like a well-rehearsed rumour.

On the second lap, a horse, no respecter of innocence, left a sizeable, steaming deposit on the road directly in front of my son George. He wrinkled his nose, affronted. "Ew, what's that smell?"

"That," I said, with the confidence of a man who believes words still matter, "is the smell of the country, dear boy."

He considered this. Then smiled. He got it.

The mood was buoyant. There is something about a crisp Boxing Day morning that drains the cynicism from people's boots. The air tasted of frost and mulled something. Riders chatted, foot followers leaned in, and the children—who had been promised excitement and delivered pageantry—stood up straighter, as if history had tapped them on the shoulder and said, Watch this.

It is fashionable to describe such gatherings as relics. Relics don't attract five hundred people with nothing more than a whistle, a horn, and a sense of continuity. Relics don't make teenagers put their phones away. Relics don't smell like horses and leather and winter grass. This was not a museum exhibit; it was a working ritual, public-facing, convivial, faintly ridiculous, and entirely human.

Which is why the conversation that hovered at the edges—between sips of tea and the stamping of hooves—mattered. Because the ban looms again in the public imagination, repackaged as progress, sold as virtue. And because the truth, like that horse's contribution to the road, has a way of asserting itself whether you like the aroma or not.

Here is the unfashionable bit. The fox hunting ban did not save foxes. It saved feelings.

Before prohibition, foxes were managed by people who knew the land like a second language. They knew the coverts, the livestock, the numbers, the balance. They were visible, scrutinised, shouted at, regulated, argued with, and—crucially—accountable. After the ban, control didn't stop. It went quiet. It fragmented. It slipped into the hedges after dark.

Foxes are still killed every day in Britain. Now it's lamping, trapping, shooting, and snaring. Often at night. Often unseen. Often, without the theatre that so offended the urban eye, and without the daylight scrutiny hunts endured. If your moral position is "I don't want foxes to die," you're arguing with history, ecology, and a pair of muddy boots. That ship sailed centuries ago. The grown-up question is how, why, and by whom.

This is the part people don't like admitting, because it spoils a tidy story. The ban was never really about animal welfare. It was about optics, class, and politics. It was about banning a visible thing that looked old-fashioned and congratulating ourselves on it. At the same time, the countryside carried on doing what it has always had to do, just without the audience.

If welfare were the priority, we would be having adult conversations about population control, livestock losses, ground-nesting birds, and the fact that a fox does not get a gentle, candlelit ending in the wild. We would talk about who is best placed to manage numbers humanely and transparently. We would accept that "out of sight" is not the same as "solved."

Instead, we banned one method, patted ourselves on the back, and ordered another round of moral comfort food. Urban comfort food, specifically—low effort, high virtue signalling, zero nutritional value.

Standing on Matching Green, watching eighty-six horses move like a single, opinionated organism, it was hard not to notice the gulf between those who know the land and those who merely comment on it. This is not an argument that you must like hunting. You don't. Taste is not compulsory. But reality is.

If you support ethical meat, deer management, and field-to-fork honesty, this conversation is already yours, whether you enjoy it or not. You cannot cheer transparency in one breath and demand invisibility in the next. You cannot outsource death to the shadows and call it kindness.

By the time the hunt moved off towards the fields, the children were asking questions—proper ones. Why are the coats red? Why does the horn sound like that? Why do people argue about it? That, to me, felt like the point. Not indoctrination, but exposure. Not romance, but honesty with cold air in its lungs.

As we headed home, boots muddy, cheeks pink, George announced that the smell of the country was "actually quite good once you know what it is." Some adults could learn from that.
So let's hear it. Was the ban about animal welfare, or about making people who never leave the city feel morally superior? Keep it civil. Or don't. But at least be honest.

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