Good to see the Fox Hunting Vote delayed by the SNP. I went to watch a few hunts when I was younger as they were, rightly or wrongly, a part of life in the part of the world I grew up in. I remember one particular hunt, I must have been around 9, where we watched a brilliant fox lose the hounds on a hillside by doubling back through a ditch and using spectators cars for cover, before disappearing down a quiet lane while the hunt went back and forth in confusion. Then someone told the hunt where it was, they ran it to ground, sent down terriers and used spades to dig it out from its den. The terriers got to it first and it was dead and torn when it was dragged out by the terrier men. The whole thing struck me as being so horrifyingly cruel and unfair, because I thought the fox had won.

Another memory from my childhood is of a farmer up the road from us who shot his dog. She was old and wasn’t able to work anymore. I remember him talking about her as his favourite dog, and for ages I couldn’t understand why someone who talked about an animal with such admiration was capable of shooting it.

Looking back I think those two memories show the difference between “real” country people and those who go in for the pageantry and theatre of Fox Hunting.

Real country people display a pragmatism towards animals that could be seen as indifference, but which stems from the respect of the animals position in the environment, which the person also inhabits. Various badgers, foxes, deer, rodents and birds are shot for their role as pests. Working animals are shot or put down at the end of their working lives or when they get sick. It’s done quietly, without fuss and while you can disagree with the justifications for killing (and I often have disagreed with people) but you’d be hard pressed not to acknowledge those justifications as having legitimacy.

But as far as I can tell, the hunting of foxes from horseback, with hounds and digging them out of the ground just because the rules of the “sport” say you can is just narcissism, cruelty and theatre disguised as tradition. It’s practiced by people who are not gamekeepers, farmers, smallholders and the like, but who work in cities and commute to work, who wear tweed once or twice a year to hunts and shoots and roll around on spotless quad bikes or range rovers. Most of them aren’t even really “posh”, just the kind of middle class management types who use hunts as a way of networking. Even as a kid, I could see, even if I didn’t understand, the vanity and the desire for social mobility on display at Fox Hunts, and thats the real reason they’re desired so much. What angers me the most is the appropriation of the idea that it’s simply “a way of life in the country”. No. It’s not. What’s a way of life is the pragmatic killing of an animal which is viewed as a pest, whether a fox, badger, deer or crow. I might not always like it, especially when it flouts the law, but I’ve seen that way of life carried out daily by people who are quiet and plain speaking and who chuckle into their pints when the Hunt turns up at the pub, resplendent in spotless tweed, sloshing down port and trying to control overweight, undertrained labradors (always called Alfie). You sit and watch them, and you realise, that’s not your way of life. That’s no ones way of life. That’s an act.

The pageantry of Fox Hunting has no place in the modern lives of real countryside people, those who make a living from the land. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. It’s a ridiculous unnecessary gamification that deserves to be forgotten. And it’s not a part of the countryside life I know and love.