Bolting foxes: Exposing the real face of hunting

Videos show hunts forcing foxes from dens or other refuges straight to hounds

Hunts across the country have held their opening meets in recent weeks as yet another fox hunting 'season' gets underway. To mark the season's start, the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) released three videos - recorded by hunters themselves - that demonstrate the despicable practice of 'bolting'.

The main fox hunting season runs from the end of October through to early April. Real Media recently explained in poetic terms what this means for foxes:

"It is killing season. November to March, fields will be bloodied, and terror will reign.
Horses will thunder, while horns scream a century’s old call: to chase, to hurt, to maim.
Men with spades dig into dens to brutalise, butcher and brawl.
Foxes, now broken, souls needlessly stolen away.
Night sweeps in with a stinging silence, holding vigil with nothing to say."

By October each year, however, foxes are already acutely aware of the barbarity that this minority of humans is capable of. The 'season' follows a three-month-long period of 'autumn hunting', otherwise known as cubbing, during which hunts train young hounds by hunting and terrorising fox cubs and young hares. Meanwhile, staghound packs have been chasing and killing mature stags over this same period and are about to set their sights on female deer (hinds).

Bolted and hunted

As Real Media highlighted, one of the horrors that hunts subject foxes to is forcing them out of their dens or other underground refuges, so the wild animals can be brutalised for 'sport'.

This is the focus of the HSA videos, which all show foxes being bolted from their hiding places so they can be illegally hunted.

In the first clip, a man is seen with a terrier under his arm and a spade blocking a hole near his feet. When he removes the spade, a fox bolts from the hole – into the path of the hunt's waiting pack of hounds:

The second video, which was recorded from a distance, shows people and a hound pack gathered on a hillside. An individual is seen banging either a spade or stick on the ground, in order to bolt a fox. Again, once the fox makes a run for it, the hunt immediately encourages its hounds to give chase after the terrified wild animal. The pleasure these wildlife criminals get from their actions is palpable in the video:

The final clip shows yet another group of individuals digging into the ground to make a fox bolt from their underground sanctuary, with hounds immediately unleashed on the wild animal to give chase. People can be seen standing further away in the landscape, seemingly in order to get a good view of the carnage.

The HSA explained that this particular form of bolting "is designed to keep the hounds ‘in blood’ by all but guaranteeing a kill."

As the HSA noted, terriermen played a central role in the actions shown in the videos. Terriermen are individuals hired by hunts to carry out certain acts, such as flushing foxes out of their underground refuges, oftentimes with the use of terriers. They also block entrances to possible fox sanctuaries, like badger setts, to stop the wild animals from being able to go to ground in the first place. It is of course illegal to interfere with an active badger sett.

The true face of hunting

Videos like these expose the real face of hunting, which is far removed from the sanitised version that the hunting industry tried to sell to the public and policymakers with its National Trail Hunting Day in September.

As an HSA spokesperson said:

"Just like the two Avon Vale videos showing separate ‘dig-outs’ in which three foxes were killed, these three videos have been filmed by the hunters themselves and then shared as sick trophies of their exploits. As the new hunting season is about to get under way with hundreds of ‘opening meets’ taking place across the country in coming weeks, this is a snapshot of what happens when hunters think they are safe in only their own company."

Hunting's true face is also apparent in Protect the Wild's annual reports. These analyses mostly document what hunts get up to at monitored meets, meaning what they do on occasions when they know they are being observed by saboteurs and monitors. The latest report – A Case for a Proper Ban on Hunting –  shows that nearly 600 wild animals were chased or killed over the course of the 2023/24 hunting season.

For all these reasons, the UK government must make good on its promise to ban trail hunting. This is the main loophole in the Hunting Act that hunts rely on to get away with continued wildlife persecution, as described in Protect the Wild's animation "A Trail of Lies".

As Protect the Wild recently said in an open letter signed by a number of high-profile British celebrities, now is the time for government action: "To put an end to the animal cruelty and criminality that is frequently observed during hunting seasons, the Labour government must ban the smokescreen that is trail hunting."