Saturday, December 01, 2007

Common Sense rules.

This blog has always held 'The Hunting with Dogs Act' to be wrong in principle and unworkable in practise. Yesterday, another nail was hammered into the coffin of this most ridiculous of prejudiced piece of legislation.

Last August, to loud applause from the Act's supporters and apologists, Mr Tony Wright of the Exmoor Foxhounds was fined £500 after a private prosecution by the League Against Cruel Sports. Mr Wright was the first to be successfully prosecuted under this Act. Oh, how they celebrated. The Act which I and others believed to be unenforceable had turned out to be enforceable after all. And the media gave this event hundreds of column inches. Hunting with dogs was all over.

Well, yesterday Judge Graham Cottle overturned Mr Wright's conviction, saying that the law was 'far from simple to interpret or apply'. This item of news received a miserable three inches in the Inbrief column. I don't think the BBC covered it at all.

UPDATE (Sun) - I see that today's Sunday Telegraph has given a decent spash to the story. Reporting a story that is favourable to the hunting cause remains too politically incorrect for the Beeb though.

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