Hunt ban 'will be changed'

Sunday, 6 November 2005 12:00 AM

A former Labour minister has criticised the ban on fox hunting, saying it is "so bad and so ridiculous" it will eventually be changed.

Kate Hoey, who opposed the ban in the Commons, said: "The reality is the police know this is a law which is totally impossible for them to enforce and the bad law always ends up being changed. I'm very confident that will happen."

The former sports minister's comments, made on GMTV's
Sunday Programme, came after many hunts turned out for the first day of the hunting season yesterday.

This is the first hunting season since the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales came into force. Some hunts used a loophole in the law which allows a fox to be killed by a bird of prey or shot if only two dogs are involved.

Speaking about the general feeling among Labour backbenchers, she said she did not see any "appetite to us going back to having another few hundred hours spent in Parliament talking about fox hunting" but added "it will eventually be changed".

She said that it was a waste of police time to be searching for hunters. "What's important is we don't have our police chasing over the countryside deciding whether someone's chasing rabbits or chasing foxes," she said. "That's not what people in my constituency want the police to be doing."

She was also unconvinced by animal welfare activists who argue that hunting is cruel to foxes. "The most important thing, and I think this is something the public will more and more realise, is that this is nothing to do with animal welfare," she said.

"And the fox at the end of it all is being killed, probably in many areas now, in much more inhumane ways - poisoned and gassed and snared."

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