The countryside is not the Countryside Alliance

A reply to Julian Glover, from someone who lives there

A blog by League Against Cruel Sports chief executive Emma Slawinski.

Spare a thought for Julian Glover. His own alarming account in The Rest is Politics newsletter, describes the countryside as being surrounded. Cities are closing in "set in concrete". Lime bikes are circling. A Prime Minister has admitted he likes Manchester. Minsters are doing "unfair things", and the shooting lobby has been hit, "out of the blue", with the outrage of a Call for Evidence. In the centre of this swirling storm stands a lone innocent huntsman whose one crime was doing exactly what he was told. 

It's a stirring picture. I live in rural West Sussex and have all my life apart from my Uni years (spent in Manchester…gasp), I have horses, green wellingtons, keep baling twine in my car, and I'm sorry to report that I don't recognise this picture at all. 

Much of what Mr Glover writes is true, and it really matters. The buses are dreadful, the broadband comes and goes, rural homes cost more to heat, and rural areas get less public health funding. Farmers are dealing with drought, low prices and a tax change that one could argue was not well handled. We are in a climate and nature crisis. Rural isolation and poverty are issues of national importance and often overlooked. If his piece had stopped there, I’d probably have signed it. 

He didn't stop there, though. Tucked in between the drought and the broadband is the "illogical" ban on trail hunting, and a little further down, worries about the future of shooting. It is, in my opinion a disingenuous trick, and that’s what I want to talk about. To give full fairness to Mr Glover it isn't a new trick, and Mr Glover isn't doing it on his own: as he tells us he's a trustee of the Countryside Alliance. 

A short lesson in scent 

First, let's be clear about what's being banned, because the hunting lobby deliberately causes confusion about it. 

Drag hunting has been around since the 1800s. Hounds follow an artificial scent, such as aniseed, along a route laid deliberately away from foxes, usually in open country. Everyone controlling the hounds knows where the trail goes and keeps the hounds on it. It's a real equestrian sport, fast and exhilarating, and no wild animal is put at risk. 

Clean boot hunting works in a similar way, except the hounds, this time bloodhounds, hunt the scent of a human runner. It's also a real sport, and nobody dies. Most people who try it end up enjoying the tea afterwards, and the runners get extra cake. 

The above sports are under the wing of the Masters of Draghounds and Bloodhounds Association who fiercely police compliance with their wildlife-sparing rules by their members. 

Trail hunting is a different thing altogether. Hunts invented it after the Hunting Act 2004 came into force. It uses animal-based scent, including fox urine. It's laid, on the days anyone bothers to lay it, along the hedgerows and through the woods where foxes have always lived. And the people laying it don't tell the huntsman where it goes, so that when the hounds find a real fox, they can all say it was an accident. 

This ‘trail’ hunting is the "very thing hunters were told to do instead", according to Mr Glover. That is not true. They weren't told to do it. Parliament didn't invent trail hunting: the hunts did, and they did it the moment the ban arrived. It is blatant fox hunting under a very poor disguise. The genuine alternatives, drag and clean boot, had existed for more than a century. Some hunts, after some experimenting, made the proper conversion from fox hunting to clean boot hunting. But the avid fox hunters instead chose to carry on doing just what they had done before, just with a different name. 

Why it has to go 

We don't have to guess how trail hunting works, because the people running it have explained it to us. 

In 2020, the director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, Mark Hankinson, was recorded advising hunt staff that using more than one trail layer makes it "easier to create a smokescreen", because it lets you show "anyone watching that you're going about legitimate business." In the same leaked webinars, a Countryside Alliance police liaison officer described trail hunting as creating "that element of doubt that we haven't deliberately hunted a fox". A judge in another case called a hunt's trail-hunting defence a "cynical subterfuge". Honestly, I couldn't make this up. 

The numbers from the field say the same thing. In the 2025–26 season, monitors recorded 488 foxes chased by hounds in England and Wales. That's up a quarter on the season before, and it only counts the hunts that were being watched. Of 624 monitored meets, only 23 (3.7%) showed any sign that a trail had been laid at all. Most of them can’t even be bothered to pretend they are following a trail. At those 23 meets that did bother, monitors still saw 22 foxes chased. It is utterly blatant law breaking, given the cover of ‘trail hunting’.  

We also logged 1,220 reports of "hunt havoc": hounds on railway lines, hounds causing crashes on roads, hounds in people's gardens, livestock worried and pets attacked. Those incidents are happening to rural people. 

Assistant Chief Constable Matthew Longman, the national lead on hunting crime, describes trail hunting as a “smokescreen” and fox hunting as “prolific”. 

Whose countryside? 

But to return to the trick that’s being played here, that can be seen in every paragraph Mr Glover wrote. 

The Countryside Alliance wasn't set up to fix the buses or support farmers. It was formed in 1997, largely out of the British Field Sports Society, and it has spent the years since presenting a field sports lobby as the voice of rural Britain. It's clever branding. Put a hunting horn next to a genuine countryside complaint, and anyone who objects to the horn can be told they're sneering at the countryside. 

But the countryside doesn't agree with the horn. In Survation polling from December 2025, 58% of people in rural areas said trail hunting should be illegal, and only 28% said it should stay legal. Across England and Wales, the figures were 62% to 24%, with majorities among Conservative, Labour, Reform, Lib Dem and Green voters alike. Earlier polling found 70% of rural respondents wanted the Hunting Act strengthened. And it isn't only voters: The National Trust stopped trail hunting on its land following a vote from its membership, and other major landowners have done the same. 

When Mr Glover quotes the Countryside Alliance's own poll showing that only 15% of rural voters think the government cares about them, I believe it. I'd only point out that feeling neglected over the bus to local Sussex towns isn't a mandate to chase foxes through Sussex's hedgerows. Rural people are tired of being ignored, and I'd add that we're also tired of being spoken for by people who don’t represent our views. The people I live alongside, including farmers, farriers, dog walkers, nurses, teachers, land managers and families whose lanes are blocked by a hunt every other weekend, never signed up to have their real problems used as cover for a pastime most of them want banned. 

That's the falsehood at the centre of Mr Glover's piece. It isn't a lie about any one fact; it's the suggestion that "the countryside" and "bloodsports" are the same interest, so that a government some perceive as taking on one must be at war with the other. They aren't the same, and they never have been. Treating them as one does real damage to the rural causes that deserve a hearing, because it lets ministers write off rural anger as the grumbling of a few red coats. 

Mr Glover asks for "a new tone of respect on each side" and "a bit of give and take". Fine. Here's my part of that bargain: I'll campaign with him on the buses, the broadband, the heating bills and fair funding. In return, their campaign for the countryside can honestly represent the countryside’s views; against hunting animals for fun.