Having grown up around fox hunting, I never saw the 'sport' as an issue when I was younger. I remember going to hunts when I was small with my Mum; riding on the back of a rusty quad bike, smelling the stench of the hounds as they loped past us, and feeling the exhilaration of it all. At no point did I feel like the day was based around killing for fun. Instead it was about community, and teamwork. With children my own age riding out for the first time with their Dad, galloping through fields and jumping hedges - just like in the Thelwell books! If anything, I was jealous I had to stay behind.
Of course now, years later, I am fully aware of the implications surrounding the sport. And I can honestly say that I would never support the return to traditional ways of fox hunting. Admittedly, the requirement to maintain population numbers is something to be taken into account. So too is the importance of community and friendship surrounding the sport - the tradition and the sense of walking in the footsteps of countless others. Yet the threat of a free vote on the Hunting Act in Parliament - should the Conservative party win the election in June - makes my heart sink. Because fox hunting is a vicious event, and it ends in immense pain and the destruction of a life that could so easily have been taken in a more human manner.
Perhaps it is because I am no longer involved in the sport itself, perhaps I don't understand the loss of community or the importance of the event for those directly implicated by the ban. However I cannot understand the need, in our present society, for the return of the culling of fox populations in this way. Of course, illegal hunting continues to happen all over the country. But so too do we find illegal hunting taking place and threatening our native bird species - the buzzard, for instance, is a predatory bird killed illegally by game keepers and farmers in order to protect livestock and smaller, moorland birds that many pay to shoot for sport. But this does not make it right, nor does it support the argument to see the return of the sport.
I can only hope that the media is right in its predictions, and that we see a continued ban on fox hunting should a free vote come to pass.