Boom! Boom!

”WHEN they hear me squeak they think it’s a mouse and look up,’ says Bruce Lindsay-Smith. ‘That’s when I shoot them in the head.’

Thanks to new hunting legislation, Mr Lindsay–Smith, “the urban fox hunter”, is not marauding around west London with red-coated men on horses and their beagles, but with night-vision glasses and a gun.

And he’s no less successful for it. As the Guardian reports, in just the last four weeks, he’s conducted more than 50 night shoots and trapped over 70 foxes in the London area.

But not all hunters are as good, or humane, as Lindsay-Smith, who says that there are a lot of “cowboys” out there.

This is thrilling news, and it’s hard not to grow exited at the notion of Londoners in chaps and six-gallon hats standing in a garden in Wanstead firing from the hip at foxes.

Indeed, just as golf, that most fusty and chauvinistic of games, has been made hip and cool by its urban variant – golfers play through the city streets at night – perhaps hunting can be made to appeal to the metropolitan elite with the arrival of shooting parties and Prada bullets?

And it’s a game without end. Tony Bull, an animal control officer in Hounslow, west London, says that foxes are territorial and killing one does not cure the problem. ‘Our experience is that as soon as you remove one fox you get another moving in very quickly,” says he.

And Martin Hemmington, founder of the National Fox Welfare Society agrees. ‘All you’re doing by removing a fox is creating a vacuum for another fox to fill and lining the pockets of pest control companies,’ says he.

But, as we say, why pay the so-called experts to do it? With an estimated 10,000 urban foxes at large, have a go for yourself.

And if you must take a pack of pit bull terriers, mongrels and other London canines along for the chase, so be it…’

Posted: 30th, January 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink