They're at it hammer and tongs over on the other side about hunting the fox with hounds. A Labour MP, no less, Kate Hoey, claims in an article in Country Life (It's the speech she made in the House of Commons) that not one fox will be saved by the bill. Also that the abolition of hunting will accelerate the process of wiping out hedgerows, making more prairies and dividing up the fields with barbed wire.
Nobody, so far (liable to correction here), claims that the fox actually enjoys the run he gets. Or dying. Anyway, there have been many to counsel the introduction of drag hunting; usually a bait trailed by a fast rider. This has long been the practice on the continent. Danzig was, in the mid-Thirties, a Free City or City-State, mostly populated by Germans, but with a Polish minority and long history of association with Poland. Now it is a Polish city.
Anyway, an account of a drag hunt of a kind in 1934, published in the Times of London gives a colourful account which some could take to heart. The reporter opens with the half-way pause at the Racecourse in Danzig. The `Fox' arrives first, the `Fox' being a former army officer, wellmounted, scarlet jacket and with a fox's brush over his left shoulder. This has to be taken by a rider coming up from the left side. A five minute pause for a glass of Danziger Goldwasser, a liqueur which has genuine gold flakes floating in its clear, anniseed-like liqueur. A police band plays. There are a dozen or so red coats, also police and Nazi uniforms and a fair number of women riders. The last man in helps stragglers and makes sure that everyone takes all of the jumps.
Once again they are off, and our reporter motors up into the low hills around the village of Oliva (where the Bishop lives, name of O'Rourke; yes, one of the Wild Geese). There are woods here, and at the finish of the hunt, trumpeters have gathered to celebrate the end of the chase. In the middle of a field a groom holds the `Fox's' horse. Our reporter spots a gleam of red in nearby thick brushwood where the `Fox' has gone to ground. After a bit of crashing around, a man triumphantly emerges waving the `Fox's' tail.
Twigs of oak are given to all who finished the course, and a rider who gains five of these is awarded a golden button. The course is thirteen kilometers and has forty jumps. So, concludes our 1934 reporter, "a Danzig gold button holder would keep a respectable place in an English hunt".