Few recent events seem to have astonished my urban friends so much as the rise of the Countryside Alliance. Growing out of, and replacing, the British Field Sports Society, it quickly became a mass movement – and one that, by British standards, has been astonishingly successful. The Alliance now has 100,000 members – well over twice the membership of the RSPCA. Membership of the Alliance means raising funds, going on marches, writing letters, attending meetings and, in general, making oneself heard above the din of modern politics in a way that goes against the grain for most rural people.
What has astonished urban opinion is that this mass movement should arise in response to a single and, to many people, trivial issue, which was the threat to ban hunting. Those of us who live in hunting districts, and who witness the social significance of a sport that is as intricately woven into the fabric of rural society as football is woven into the life of the towns, were less surprised. But what the Alliance has brought home to all except the determinedly mythopoeic is that the freedom to hunt engages with the deepest feelings of many rural residents, and that a great many farmers and landowners simply do not regard this freedom as negotiable.
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