Blood-spattered fox hunting season begins
By Chris Luffingham
Posted 31st October 2025
A blog by Chris Luffingham, deputy chief executive at the League Against Cruel Sports
This weekend will see the start of the fox hunting season, the barbaric blood sport that still blights our countryside.
Hunts will already have been out training their hounds to kill by targeting fox cubs, but the beginning of November marks the official start of the season.
Despite a much-heralded ban that came into force twenty years ago, hunts will be behaving as they did before the Hunting Act was passed, chasing and killing foxes, until the end of March.
Their hounds are trained to kill and the huntsman controlling them will let them loose in the countryside in a bid to find their quarry – the red fox.
The harrowing truth is that once it is found, if a fox becomes exhausted, makes a wrong move, or is simply not fast enough, the hounds seize it and literally tear it apart.
Don’t let the hunts try to hoodwink you about this – the eviscerated blood-spattered corpse of a fox, its intestines often on show, is the end product of this brutal activity.
Not only do the hunts continue to flout the law by carrying out one of the worst forms of animal cruelty, but they are also blatantly lying. To you, the police, the courts and the wider public.
The hunting world has invented an elaborate sham called trail hunting in which they purport to follow a scent rather than live animals.
But this increasingly discredited invention has been shown to be a smokescreen concealing their illegal fox hunting.
The League publishes figures at the end of every fox hunting season showing the scale of killing still taking place with hundreds of reports of illegal hunting. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
And the new hunting season promises to be no different, with more foxes set to suffer and facing a cruel death at their hands.
But there is hope and a way in which you can help end this.
The government announced in parliament this week that it is set to hold a consultation early next year to ban trail hunting.
The minister Angela Eagle MP said they planned to create an “enforceable ban that truly protects our wildlife, countryside, and rural communities.”
We are calling on supporters to pledge to take part in this consultation and to support this ban on trail hunting.
We will also be calling on supporters to urge the government to remove the absurd exemptions from the Hunting Act which hunts use to get around the law, and to introduce an effective deterrent in the form of prison sentences for those that break the law.
The time for change is now and together we will end hunting with dogs.
You can take the following pledge to participate in the consultation and help consign the savage blood sport of fox hunting to the history books.
Foxes are still falling victim to hunts in the countryside