Foxes will be controlled by the natural availability of food. - MYTH

This is great. It sounds sooo scientific. You can really imagine David Attenborough coming out with this….

Scientific, precise, to the point. Marvellous. No wonder the antis love it.

But what does it actually mean?

What it means is that the foxes will eat everything that they can get their tiny little teeth into in order to stay alive.

Or, at least the "fittest" ones will.

The less fit ones will starve to death!

That’s what it means. "To be controlled by the natural availability of food"

If you use this argument, you are stating that you would rather that foxes took days or weeks to starve to death, rather than being hunted for an average of 45 minutes, with the possibility of being killed in seconds if caught by the hounds.

That’s an interesting decision, but I don't think that you would find many foxes voting for you.

But it gets worse…

Because, whilst the unfit foxes are starving to death, the fitter ones are eating themselves out of house and home.

Before the so-called "control mechanism" can cut in, the foxes first have to reach the end of the natural availability of food.

In other words, they have to chomp their way through the invertebrates, small mammals, ground-nesting birds and farmers’ livestock to such an extent that these supplies become limited enough to "control" the foxes.

What effect, you might well ask, will that have on the populations of those food species?

Experience has shown that in some ecosystems the effect of such occurrences can be devastating. A change in the fox control policy in Holland led to several species of ground nesting birds being extinguished from some Dutch Nature Reserves before the situation resolved itself.

The more technical stuff :

Now some anti-hunters, whose scientific vocabulary outsizes their scientific knowledge, will start whittering on about foetal suppression and other effects preventing over-population before starvation sets in or irreversible harm is done to prey species.

This would be true – in a stable ecosystem.

But we are not talking about a stable ecosystem here.

We are talking about an artificial, man-managed ecosystem that is DE-stabilised, by the removal of the established culling regime.

It is true that a natural level will set in eventually, controlled by natural mechanisms, but this can take generations to establish itself.

The problems that we must worry about can occur before that stabilisation has had time to occur.

Ecosystems that have taken millennia to evolve can be destroyed in a single day.

Ask the anti-hunters whether they can guarantee that what happened in Holland will not happen here.

Until they can – tell them to stop messing about with what they do not understand!