My 48 lovely bloodhounds have by no means damage a fly

My dogs – all 48 of them – are a huge part of my life. My heart breaks when I lose one of them. Every animal lover will understand the pain of that.

But if Labour gain power next month, I fear that many will have to be destroyed, and with them the most joyous part of my life.

I do not trust that, armed with a large majority in the Commons and drunk on a metropolitan self-righteousness, they will not follow through on the threat made earlier this year to ban hunting with dogs, effectively taking a bolt gun to a much-loved country pursuit about which they are clueless.

On Friday, Labour Shadow Environment Secretary Steve Reed pledged to end trail hunting, the practice of dogs following the scent of an animal’s urine on a rag that a person trails through the countryside. This is not foxhunting in any shape or form.

About drag hunting – which uses an artificial scent, like aniseed, and follows a pre-determined route – Reed has kept quiet.

This has not always been so, for in February he unequivocally declared his desire to ban drag hunting as well as trail, promising a total ban ‘in the first term of a Labour government’. My dogs are bloodhounds, which I employ in ‘clean boot hunting’ – a form of drag hunting that doesn’t use scent, relying on the formidable sense of smell the breed has.

As the hunting master of the Coakham pack in Kent and East Sussex, I’m responsible for these tear-jerkingly wonderful creatures, the most loving animals you could find. These dogs – like the 13 other bloodhound packs across the country – never harm a living thing when we hunt.

They chase human runners, not foxes – and when they catch their prey, as they always do, the only danger is that they might lick someone to pieces. Even the hunt saboteurs know it. These class warriors still wage unending war on traditional fox hunts, which have not been allowed to chase foxes since Tony Blair banned the practice in 2004.

But they leave us alone because they know the Coakham is law-abiding and has never hunted any animal since it was set up in 1976.

Despite this, Labour’s stance on hunting of any form is always hostile, misguided and plays to the ignorance of city dwellers who assume all hunting must be cruel and that all huntsmen and huntswomen are ultra-privileged landed gentry. Both those assumptions are completely wrong.

If you join us on a hunt day, the first thing you’d see is we are not posh in the slightest. I left school with one O-level (in metalwork) before becoming an entrepreneur. Most rural people aren’t wealthy. We don’t wear red coats or mill around the stable yards of stately homes while flunkeys serve sherry on silver platters.

The hunt begins when the runners leave, half an hour ahead of the dogs. When the dogs set off, there’s no thrill like it. Their sense of smell is so exceptional, it’s all we riders on horseback can do to keep up with the pack, often running at up to 30mph.

The Coakham has two senior officials, the field master (a job I did for the best part of 20 years) and the huntsman (which is what I am now). Their combined responsibility is to look after the dogs, the people and the land itself.

As field master, I would walk every stretch of land before a hunt, looking for hidden dangers – a piece of farm machinery, hidden on the far side of a hedge or wall, or a piece of wire that could injure or kill a horse or its rider. On the day of the hunt, I’d be making sure the hunt followers kept back at a safe distance.

Now that I’m the huntsman, my job is to ride close to the hounds, communicating with them constantly and calling them off if they look like making a wrong turn.

Cynics who suspect this is all an elaborate cover for hunting foxes couldn’t be more wrong. Bloodhounds don’t have that instinct.

And it’s very rare that any foxhound pack kills a fox, even by accident. Nowadays, not only are the remaining 170-odd packs mostly well-run and law-abiding, everyone with a smartphone has a video camera now, so no hunt could possibly get away with a kill, even if they wanted to.

I have no desire to hunt foxes or to defend doing so but the hunting ban has done nothing to protect these wild animals. The reverse is true. Some landowners exterminate foxes entirely — easily done with a modern infra-red night-sight on a rifle. It’s not constantly and calling them off if they look like making a wrong turn.

It’s a very close relationship, almost as tight-knit as that between a shepherd and his collie.

Cynics who suspect this is all an elaborate cover for hunting foxes couldn’t be more wrong. Bloodhounds don’t have that instinct.

And it’s very rare that any foxhound pack kills a fox, even by accident. Nowadays, not only are the remaining 170-odd packs mostly well-run and perfectly law-abiding, everyone with a smartphone has a video camera in their pocket now, so no hunt could possibly get away with a kill, even if they wanted to.

I have no desire to hunt foxes or to defend doing so, but the hunting ban has done nothing to protect these wild animals. In fact, the reverse is true. Some landowners reverse is true. Some landowners exterminate foxes entirely – easily done with an infra-red night-sight on a rifle. It’s not uncommon for professionals to slaughter a couple of dozen in a night.

Where this isn’t done, though, foxes can wreak havoc on not only farmland, killing lambs, but on the number of ground-nesting birds such as larks.

But then hunting with dogs has never been a issue where rational argument prevailed. Even Blair now admits Labour could have far more usefully directed its energies elsewhere: Parliament spent 700 hours debating hunting, a complete waste of time.

Why Starmer is intent on pursuing this bad example defies understanding. It’s nothing more than a return to the politics of envy, in keeping with his misguided proposal for VAT on school fees.

If Labour’s urban activists are genuinely concerned about isolated instances of fox-killing, a more effective solution would be to issue licences to packs. Then no master would dare do anything that risked losing the licence.

Instead, the party will punish all countryside people for the occasional misdemeanours of a few.

Labour is a metropolitan party, led by a North London lawyer (though as the Mail revealed last weekend, his forebears lived in a castle). All this sends a message that the party doesn’t like Britain’s rural communities, understand them or respect their traditions.

For many, that’s compounded by the drive to cover fields with solar panels and giant wind turbines in pursuit of ‘net zero’. It makes us feel as though, to Labour, the countryside is a mere resource to be exploited and mistreated. Farming can be a tough, isolated life. In a recent poll, 95 per cent of farmers designated poor mental health as one of the biggest problems.

Many farmers have told me how much they look forward to our hunt’s annual visits between October and March. If the Coakham is shut, they will suffer for it – and lose its enormous community benefits across Kent and East Sussex.

But worst affected will be the dogs. Each year I expect a handful to retire and I work hard to find loving homes for them. As they get older, hounds still want to run but can develop creaky joints and sore paws. 

Some can be nursed back to health. I’ve got half a dozen around the house, recuperating. There are usually two or three suitable takers on my books to adopt a bloodhound. They are wonderful family pets.

But what I can do with 48, if Labour cancels the Coakham, I have no idea. The thought is too awful to contemplate.

lIvan Massow is a finance and tech entrepreneur who teaches entrepreneurship at Cambridge University.