Clause 8 - Tests for registration: utility and least suffering
Hunting Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Hugo Swire (East Devon, Conservative)
I shall leave that for Mrs. Roe to decide. Hughes continued:
''This must be one of English conservation's most impressive success stories. And yet it depends on a single fragile psychological factor—what I have called that 'mysterious thing'. The Hunt itself is helpless to protect the deer. The secret lies in that strange agreement among the farmers and country people of the entire sprawling region, a decision arrived at God knows how, to refrain from killing the deer.
The effects of this unspoken contract are so real that farmers far from the Hunt's heartland now find themselves going to some trouble to protect odd groups of resident red deer. I know one farmer 30 miles from the Hunt's usual limits who was recently tolerating over 20, on less than 300 acres. Few such farmers would suppose they were preserving deer for the Hunt. Many of them will have little direct interest in it. But Staghunting touches deep tribal springs. This attitude to the red deer has a pride and sovereignty all its own. And this is one way in which these men can confirm their solidarity with the inner life of the region: they refrain from killing the deer.
Even so, the agreement is precarious. This protection is granted to the herd on a condition. The moment the Hunt is banned, everything changes. The deer instantly lose all symbolic meaning, as the totems of a special way of life. Ejected from their sacred niche in the community, they suddenly belong to everybody and nobody. They have become vagrants, deprived of all status. Or rather, they have a new status—one that is dangerous to them. They now belong to a government that has just proved itself unsympathetic, even hostile, towards the Westcountry farmer's way of life. And this government, with its well-known, official faces, having taken the deer from the farmers, has straight away dumped them back on his fields as expensive squatters, to be fed and cared for by him. Meanwhile, those enterprising young locals look at the deer with new eyes. What they see now are huge, unclaimed packages of saleable meet and exciting fun just wandering about.''