Hunting is unfair - MYTH

Many people think that the fox has no chance because it is only one little animal against lots of humans and dogs.

Consider these points :

• The Fox is faster than the hounds
• The fox is in its own territory. It knows it like the back of its hand.
• The hounds are lost. They do not know where they are.
• The fox can run through or under many obstacles that the hounds will have to bypass
• The fox is much lighter than the hounds, and can run across soft ground much more easily than them.
• The fox can keep running at its own pace, whereas the hounds have to follow the "scent" (smell). Each time they lose the scent and have to "cast around" for it, the fox gains time.
• The fox, who sometimes hunts by scent himself, knows how to disguise his scent by running through water, manure, sheep, across tarmac or similar confusing smells.
• The fox also knows that he can confuse and evade his pursuers by leading them to where another fox is lying (yes, they do do this), and letting the hounds hunt the "fresh" fox.

So you can see that the fox, contrary to what you thought, actually has the advantage over the hunters.

In practice hounds probably kill less than one in three foxes that they chase.

Huh! You might say that but how would you like to be chased across a field by a pack of dogs?

So why do we use so many dogs at a time?

This is simply a matter of ensuring that when the fox does get killed, it gets killed as quickly as possible.

Look at it this way : If you were going to be killed and eaten by dogs, would you prefer to be killed by one or by thirty.

Thirty dogs would be messier to look at , yes, it would appear to be more violent, yes, but it would also be much, much quicker. And lets face it, speed is what is important.

One dog = slow

Thirty dogs = fast.

Work it out for yourself…

(incidentally, this is yet another indicator that we are not in this for sadism – if we we were , we would want it to be slow…)