Politics Home | Thousands call on the government to stand by its promises to ban trail hunting

Fake foxes covered in blood with League ‘hunter’ on the streets of London outside the National Gallery.

A huge pile of bloody foxes appeared in central London yesterday [Tuesday] to highlight the scale of illegal hunting in England and Wales that has continued since the government took power.

National animal welfare charity the League Against Cruel Sports was behind the stunt, which saw a “hunter” dump 648 foxes in Trafalgar Square – one for each report the charity has received of a fox being chased by hunts since the summer of 2024.

Meanwhile, animal welfare campaigners from the League-led Time for Change Coalition Against Hunting handed in an open letter signed by more than 36,000 people in just one month to Sir Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street.

The letter, which calls on his government to keep its promise to properly ban hunting wild animals with dogs, comes a year after a 104,000-signature petition calling for stronger hunting laws was handed in to Number 10 on the twentieth anniversary of the Hunting Act coming into force.

Emma Slawinski, League Against Cruel Sports chief executive, said: “The government isn’t keeping its promises, and the dumped bloodied foxes are there to show the scale of illegality that the government is failing to get to grips with.

“The public is repulsed by trail hunting, which is just a smokescreen for foxes and other wild animals still being chased and torn apart by hunt hounds, so we are urging the government to act immediately to end this savage blood sport once and for all.”

The government pledged to ban so-called trail hunting in its manifesto, and further promised to launch a public consultation “in the new year” when it launched its animal welfare strategy before Christmas.

This has not happened.

Emma said: “The time for change is now and the government must urgently launch its consultation, which should also include the removal of the exemptions in the Hunting Act that hunts exploit to get around the current weak law, the introduction of custodial sentences, and the outlawing of reckless, or ‘accidental’ hunting.” 

Polling commissioned by the League Against Cruel Sports and carried out independently by FindOutNow with further analysis by Electoral Calculus in March/April 2024 found that 76 per cent of the public supported stronger fox hunting laws, with only seven per cent disagreeing.

A clear majority of voters in rural as well as urban areas backed new laws to stop foxes being chased by hounds and killed, with 70 per cent of people in the countryside supporting the proposal.

More about how to take part in the consultation, and how people can make their voice heard, is available here: https://www.league.org.uk/hunting_consultation