Enlightening Equestrians
A late year morning swamped in winter-smelling air. Horsemen are riding, galloping something serious in a blaze of red through the chilly English countryside. Mud spatters their riding boots, and the sudden toot-toot of a hunting horn sounds. The roar of a hundred hounds, a hundred howlers, take up the call. This is the world of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man . But this vision, once so common in the pre-millennium English landscape, is now mostly alien to us. Hunting with dogs, now banned in mainland Britain (excluding Northern Ireland where a proposal in December 2021 failed to pass among MLAs at Stormont ), will likely elicit impassioned disgust in the reader’s heart. Reading Sassoon a near-century on, we reluctantly trot into a world that is not only reprehensible but illegal — a world that provokes repulsion in its proud posturing of an old-world gentrified pastime. Nevertheless, we must understand that fox-hunting was a norm in Sassoon’s day....
