Saturday February 13th 2021
The director of the national foxhounds association has been charged with intentionally encouraging or assisting others to break foxhunting laws after leaked videos of a private lecture for hunt leaders were posted online.
Mark Hankinson, 60, director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, has been charged with breaking the law under the Hunting Act 2004 following an investigation by Devon & Cornwall police into online webinars held in August last year. He is due to appear before Plymouth magistrates’ court on March 4.
Private video seminars held by the Hunting Office, the executive body for more than 170 hunting packs in England, Scotland and Wales, were infiltrated last year by saboteurs who published them online and claimed that they discussed how to create a “smokescreen” for illegal hunting.
Hankinson was one of the speakers who gave a short lecture on how to operate a hunt meet.
The Hunting Office tried to take the videos down and dismissed the claims of covering up illegal hunting as “taking a few individual short comments completely out of context”.
When hunting mammals using dogs was made illegal in the UK in February 2005, packs turned to trail hunting, which is supposed to mimic traditional hunting by following a fox-based scent trail that has been laid by runners or horse riders. When a fox is killed during a trail hunt, it is often argued by hunters that the hounds accidentally came across the animal while following a prepared scent trail.
The leaked hunt webinars, which The Times has viewed, addressed how to remain within the law, how to provide evidence of legal trail hunting to the police and courts if anti-hunt activists are present and accuse them of illegal hunting, and how to deal with animal welfare activism.
However, the Hunt Saboteurs Association claims that during certain sections of the webinars comments made by participants suggested that they were trying to use legal trail hunting to carry out illegal fox hunting with hounds.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/head-huntsman-charged-with-encouraging-law-breakers-lm36bwt5d