Baroness Mallalieu:

Baroness Mallalieu:

My Lords, I should declare some interests as president of the Countryside Alliance, as chairman of the Labour leave Country Sports Alone Campaign and also as a member of the RSPCA.

It is sometimes only when one looks back on events that the defining moments stand out. At the age of 10 I went to a meet of the South oxfordshire Hounds on a small black pony which had cost £25 in Thame cattle market. I had no family connections with hunting; I was jut a child with a love of horses and kind neighbouring farmers who took me with them. From that moment hunting has been one of the great and enduring passions of my life. It has taken me into some of the most beautiful and secret places in England. It has introduced me to another country within our country and to people whose world I might so easily never have known. It has taught me only a little of the ways of wild animals but it has also taught me how vital man's role in the management of both wildlife populations and of cour countryside.

Following, or trying to follow, hounds on a horse has brought me excitement, exhilaration, exhaustion, not a little fear and a pleasure which defies words. But, above all, the hunting community has taught me, as a lifelong member of the Labour party, the true meanin of the word "comradeship".

I am not dure that those who would pass a law to criminalise those who hunt even now begin to understand what they take on. If the foot and mouth epidemic had not intervened, next sunday this capital city would have seen the biggest civil rights demonstration in our history. It takes a great deal to rouse quiet, hard-working, decent people with busy lives and families and to turn them into political activits for the first time in their lives. The sense of injustice generated as a result of this miserable Bill, hurled by the elected Chamber in the face of a countryside already in deep crisis has done just that. As the noble Lord, lord Mancroft, said, that march would have been an appeal to your Lordships from the countryside of Britain to protect its people against prejudice, perversity and intolerance.

If any noble Lords wonder whether they have the right to oppose the views of the other place, I must ask what on earth is the point of a second Chamber if it will not rise up and say so when the other place goes badly wrong? The countryside is looking to us to give that signal and to do so before a general election takes place. I have friends both in this House and outside who dislike hunting and I have others who love it as I do. Their views cross party political divisions. What distinguishes the two sides is not any greater affection for animals, or any greater imagination, or any greater degree of humanity, it is quite simply a different set of experiences, or, often, no experience whatsoever of the subject. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, has made an impassioned speech. I greatly respect his views. I count him--I hope that I shall still do so later--as a friend. He admitted on Friday that he has never been out hunting. I venture to suggest that the noble Baroness, Lady Castle, one of my best friends in this House, is in a similar position.

If I had not gone out with those hounds all those years ago, I, too, might have disliked hunting from all that I would have read and heard from the pressure groups with large chequebooks who have placed a steady stream of propaganda, much of it wholly inaccurate, before the nation. But even if I had disliked hunting as a result of that, I still do not believe that I would have been prepared to vote to criminalise my noble friends Lord Graham and Lady Castle for something they did but which I disliked, particularly when an independent inquiry had not found either the practices they enjoyed to be intrinsically cruel or otherwise damaging to the national interest. I might argue with them and try to dissuade them, but I would not try to pass criminal laws to impose my personal morality on them. During the long journeys to and from this House late at night driving the noble Baroness, Lady Castle, back to the village in which we both live, I may have failed to convince her but I take some comfort from the knowledge that her spaniel, Bertie, who specialises in muntjac, totally agrees with my views.

The main objection which opponents of hunting have put forward is that they believe it to be cruel. I do not. If I did, I would not dream of doing it and nor should others. Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of unnecessary suffering. I accept that hunting involves suffering--the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer of Sandwell, mentioned this--but the death of any wild animal almost invariably does. Let us remember that foxes die violently mainly in road accidents, or as a result of the actions of man, or from sickness, disease or starvation. The fortunate few--they are a few--die in seconds when they are hit by a vehicle and killed outright, or are killed in seconds by hounds, as the inquiry of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, found to be the case. But the vast majority die slowly and often painfully over hours, days and weeks.

There is no perfect way to kill a fox or any other wild animal. But what this Bill would do is to take away from the farmer the option of getting the local hunt in to disperse the fox population and to control fox numbers. Yet that is the only option which both respects a closed breeding season, which is selective in that the old, the weak and the sick are most likely to be culled, and costs the farmer nothing. As other noble Lords have said, if one bans hunting--I shall cut this short--one leaves effectively three legal alternatives, which are snaring, using shotguns or, in those places where it is safe, where animals, people and the terrain allow it, the use of a rifle. I do not think that anyone in this House has suggested that either foxes shot with shotguns or those caught in snares die less unpleasantly than those who die at the hands of hounds. If anyone suggests that in today's crisis farmers should start to employ skilled marksmen to patrol their hills and fields to shoot foxes by night, he or she has no understanding of either the depth of the current farming crisis or of farmers.

It is no use making fine speeches--we have heard a number in the Chamber today--about the cruelty of hunting and calling for a ban when the result will be to leave available only methods likely to cause an increase in animal suffering. But that is the reality which supporters of the ban often find hard to confront. They say that it is morally wrong to kill animals for sport; yet in the same breath they also say that shooting and fishing are fine. That must be illogical and, in my book, takes the biscuit for hypocrisy.

The premise on which their argument is based is also wrong. No one out hunting kills anything for fun. The huntsman, and his assistant if he has one, have a job to do. Farmers give permission for hounds to disperse the foxes on their land, and to reduce the numbers--I stress, not to exterminate them but to keep the numbers manageable. The huntsman's job with his hounds is to carry out that task. But those who follow, whether on horses, in cars, on bikes or on foot, are observers only. Their reasons for being there are many and varied. Some like to gallop and jump. Some like to watch the hounds and huntsmen and some to ride in places to which they would otherwise have no access. But if any one of them went hunting to enjoy killing, he would have a very lean time of it. Hunting is conducted in public. In 40 years I have never seen anyone take such pleasure and anyone who did so would be out "quicker than that".

We tread a dangerous path once we in Parliament start to pass criminal laws based on what one person thinks is going on in the head of another. That is the path surely towards thought police. Few people outside the world of hunting know how much the practices and the organisation have changed in the past 10 years. There are now strict rules and codes of practice, a strict disciplinary procedure to enforce them, training and licensing of terrier men, inspectors and the independent regulatory body to which reference has already been made.

I accept that the situation is not perfect. Improvements have still to be made--as the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, indicated; I welcome the suggestions they made in their excellent report--and aspects which should be re-examined. However, at the end of the day that report--it was provided to inform both Houses of Parliament--found hunting neither to be intrinsically cruel (and I am grateful that that has been spelt out this evening once and for all to nail what has been, I am afraid I cannot mince my words, a lie) nor any other overwhelming reason for a ban in the public interest.

The debate will take some time. I shall draw the remarks I should otherwise have made to a close. However, I simply say this. There will be little opportunity today to talk about the work that hunting does undertake. A large amount of our countryside is either owned by hunts or managed by them for hunting. With the benefits from looking after woodland to encourage wildlife come benefits for the whole of our population. Many in this House with no connection with the countryside none the less enjoy walking around it. But do they ever stop to look around and wonder who has maintained the woodland drives, put in the bridges and small gates and coppiced the woods, because more often than not that work will have been done by volunteers or employees of the local hunt.

For 24 hours a day, seven days a week hunt kennels provide a casualty service for injured animals and the disposal of carcasses. There is no alternative. It will be no good telephoning my noble friends Lady Castle or Lord Graham, or even Deadline 2000, to ask them to take away the cow with a broken leg, having first dispatched that cow humanely. The costs of that service to the hunts are astronomic. They involve wages of employees, vehicles for collection, fuel, and the oil costs which the hunts of this country pay for incinerators to burn the offal that cannot be used. For many packs it is far cheaper to buy food for their hounds but they continue to provide that service because no one else will do so. My local pack, the Bicester, last year spent £36,000 out of its subscriptions to provide that service to its local farming community.

On Exmoor the hunt is the only casualty service for the wild red deer. Even the National Trust, which refused to grant licences for deer hunting on its estate, cannot provide an alternative. It still calls in the stag hounds to find and dispatch injured deer which would otherwise face profound suffering. For all the rhetoric we have heard, there is no alternative and none is being suggested by those who support the Bill.

I find it deeply ironic that people who are now threatened with the loss of their jobs, homes and livelihoods which they greatly cherish, and who read descriptions of themselves particularly from another place as barbaric and inhumane, are now being called in by MAFF to help with the humane slaughter of livestock in the foot and mouth disease epidemic. We are, I think, living in mad times. We had hoped that we had a Government who would unite our country. It is to no little extent the fault of this miserable Bill that we are dividing our countryside and our nation. This madness must stop. Noble Lords on all sides of this House who value fairness, tolerance and liberty must by their opposition ensure that it does so.

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