Hunting for perspective

I was protesting in Parliament Square once again yestarday. This time the topic was not Iraq, at least not directly. In an attempt to divert public attention from the continuing abuses of the Occupation, Tony Blair announced our of the blue last week that he will rush through a bill to turn hundreds of thousands of ordinary British citizens into criminals through banning hunting, sometheing he feels doesn't fit into our civilised world of fast food and depleted uranium bullets.

Tony Blair doesn't seem to give a stuff about more than 13,000+ Iraqi civilians who have been killed by the Coalition (two days ago I met a couragous 11yr girl from Basra who lost 17 family members and one leg when Blair & Bush bombed her home in Basra), but apparently he cares a great deal about preventing foxes and hares from dying natural predatory deaths, in a chase as old as evolution.

In order to force this Bill through against the wishes of the public and the more sensible second chamber, Blair is taking two very unusual step. Firstly he will use the powerful Parliament Act, for only about the sixth time in a century, and secondly he wants to delay the implementation of the bill for two years in order to avoid nonviolent civil disobedience through people violating this law in the run up to the next general election.

There are plenty of moral grounds upon which one can judge hunting negatively, but very few of the opponents of hunting, and almost certainly none of the 339 MPs who voted for a ban yestarday, actually live by a system of ethics (such as Janism) consistent with such a view. Furthermore, irrespective of their personal ethics, by banning hunting they will be violating the civil liberties upon which our democracy is meant to be based.

I am a Green activist who has been largely vegetarian for 8 years, and I personally consider hunting to be an exteremely positive pursuit which is in tune with nature and nutures in most people a love and concern for our landscape and ecology. I followed hounds for a couple of years as a boy (though I haven't done so for almost a decade now), and that was one of main stimuli which impressed on me the importance of the environment (the primary stimulus was becoming a Christian and recognizing the intrinisic value of God's Creation).

For a closer scruitiny of hunting under the lense of a wide range of ethical systems, from utilitarianism to Islam to environmental ethics see my philosophy thesis: The Ethics of Hunting.