Last year the Hunt Saboteurs Association published two secretly-recorded Zoom webinars showing some of the UK’s leading hunting personnel, including high-ranking former police officers, providing a training seminar to over 100 hunt masters across the UK about so-called ‘trail hunting’ (where hunts supposedly follow a laid scent to imitate a fox hunt, since actual fox hunting is now illegal).
Campaigners have long argued, with strong supportive evidence in many cases, that trail hunting is being used as a cover for the continuation of illegal fox hunting. Hunting organisations have denied this, of course, and have always claimed that any fox they’ve killed was caught ‘accidentally’ and not deliberately.
Campaigners claimed that the content of the two leaked webinars (see here) showed that there was now evidence to demonstrate a ‘nationwide conspiracy’ to commit perjury and flout the 2005 ban on hunting with hounds after some of the webinar trainers were caught discussing how to create a smokescreen, presumably to avoid prosecution for illegal fox hunting.
I was interested in these webinars because one of the contributors, former Police Inspector Phil Davies, serves on the Raptor Persecution Priority Delivery Group (RPPDG) as a representative of the Countryside Alliance (see here). The RPPDG is supposed to help prevent raptor persecution crimes in England & Wales, although to date it has achieved naff all other than to create an impression of tackling raptor persecution.
The hunting webinars were brought to the attention of the police and an investigation was launched. This led to the prosecution of Mark Hankinson from The Hunting Office, whose trial took place in September and who last week was convicted at Westminster Magistrates Court of encouraging or assisting others to commit an offence (to illegally fox hunt).
This prosecution and conviction is a huge blow to the reputation of the hunting community and the subsequent widespread publicity will have been damaging (e.g. see here, here, here, here, here, here), with large landowners now considering whether to ban trail hunting on their land.
For those interested in the legal arguments I’d thoroughly recommend reading the following documents: the closing submissions of the defence and prosecution, and the court’s judgement.
In the blog I wrote last year about these webinars (here), I argued that it’d be interesting to see whether there were grounds for Phil Davies and/or the Countryside Alliance to be suspended from the RPPDG as the police investigation in to the webinar content got underway, in the same way that Forestry England, National Trust, United Utilities, Lake District National Park Authority and Natural Resources Wales had initiated a suspension of trail hunt licences. I also wondered whether Mr Davies’ position, and/or that of the Countryside Alliance, on the RPPDG would be reviewed after the findings of the police investigation were known.
Well, here we are a year and a bit later. Mr Davies was NOT prosecuted for his role in the webinar, only Mark Hankinson was charged and prosecuted. However, if you read the judgement document it seems quite clear to me that Deputy Chief Magistrate Tan Ikram had cause to question the intention behind the comments made by other webinar participants, including Mr Davies, and that the judge wasn’t overly impressed with Davies’ comments about ‘creating smokescreens’ and ‘creating elements of doubt’, in the judge’s view presumably made to help hunt masters avoid prosecutions for illegal fox hunting. Here is the relevant excerpt from the judgement:
As far as I’m aware, Phil Davies was not suspended from serving on the RPPDG while the trial went ahead. So what about now, with the judge’s damning remarks ringing in everyone’s ears?
UPDATE 20th October 2021: Further evidence to support a review of Countryside Alliance’s position on raptor group (here)
UPDATE 25th October 2021: Police boot off Countryside Alliance rep from all wildlife crime priority delivery groups after hunting webinar trial (here)
