On Boxing Day 2015 we teamed up again with our friends from Somerset Hunt Saboteur Group to sab the East Devon Hunt. We arrived in Honiton in plenty of time to watch the hunt ride out from the car park at Stags Estate Agents (the former cattle market) – yes, they sponsor the hunt! We were surprised but pleased by the poor turnout of hunt supporters on Honiton High Street. Huntsman Darren Beeney didn’t want to linger for very long in the town centre so they quickly made their way up towards St Cyres’ Hill.
Beeney likes to cover a lot of ground but doesn’t ever stop for long enough in one area to do much hunting. The East Devon ‘country’ is pretty cut up, with lots of land they don’t have permission to hunt on, hence why a lot of our day was spent following the hunt along the road for miles. The field, no doubt consisting of a number of inexperienced riders, were for the most part kept well away from the action. Perhaps they couldn’t be trusted with the hunt’s dirty secrets. Safe to say: we saw a lot more than they or the hunt support did on this day.
With 14 sabs and only one 5-seater car between us, it took a while to shuttle our foot sabs into position, but for once the weather and phone signal were on our side! Having changed out of their red coats and into some less conspicuous black ones, the ‘red coats’ escorted field and hounds all the way north to Wolford Cross and spent a good hour in the area between there and Sidling Common. Riders and hounds eventually made their way out to the road. The terriermen chatted to the huntsman before getting on their quads and driving back across fields in the opposite direction. Because they were headed towards a wood, we became suspicious that a fox may have been hunted to ground and the terriermen were going back to dig it out.
One team of sabs tried to locate the terriermen while others followed the huntsman and hounds, who were by now heading several miles south towards Hembury Fort and on to Penscombe Wood, where hounds briefly went into cry. When Beeney noticed foot sabs, equipped with horn and gizmo, on a nearby footpath, he called the hounds out of the valley. He had only managed to gather 6 hounds when he rode off north on a green lane, leaving the rest of his pack behind. We’re not sure whether he expected the other hounds to follow him but they clearly had other plans! While Beeney’s horn calls were getting fainter, the hounds were paying no attention and were busy rioting on deer in the valley.
The two suspicious quadbikes were still awol, but regular EDH terrierman cocky-but-clueless Lewis Strawbridge and his mate arrived near Penscombe Wood. Sabs pointed out the new huntsman’s poor hound control and asked Lewis what old huntsman Martyn Livy would make of this, to which Lewis simply replied, “who?”. Evidently not a big fan of poor old Livy then! Beeney returned about 20 minutes later, gathered up the rest of his hounds and headed south on the road back towards the meet. By now, another foot team had located the two suspicious quadbikes, abandoned in a field directly adjacent to the woods they had been seen heading towards earlier.
Sabs found a large, active badger sett which showed clear signs of very recent interference: spade marks next to the holes and lots of holes completely filled-in with fresh soil. The police were called and other sabs waited on the road for them to arrive. Lewis arrived at the scene, probably wanting to join in the action. He obviously wasn’t expecting to find sabs waiting for him though and when sabs informed him that the police were on their way, Lewis quickly got on the phone to his mates and made a very speedy getaway. At around the same time, four terriermen carrying a spade and a terrier exited the woods. When they saw sabs waiting for them in the field they too masked-up and sped off on their quads.
Devon & Cornwall Police once again showed themselves to be completely useless. Having earlier promised that they were on their way out to us, they sent a text message to one of the sabs announcing that they would no longer be attending the scene and they wouldn’t be unblocking the sett. Unbelievably, they even suggested that the interference with the badger sett may have been legal and licensed by Natural England! We have already followed this up with complaints to Devon & Cornwall police, as we don’t recall ever having heard of a Natural England-endorsed sett-blocking exercise involving masked-up terriermen and terriers linked to an illegal foxhunt! Though we saw plenty of illegal sett-blocking during the recent badger cull, it’s beggars belief that the police would suggest it might be legal for someone to suffocate a protected species in their sett, never mind send a terrier down into the sett! D&C Police did apologise and said they would be “reeducating” their officers… Unfortunately, a lack of education isn’t the only problem when it comes to D&C Police’s handling of wildlife crime cases. We have too many police officers with direct links to the hunting fraternity and a Police & Crime Commissioner who himself is pro-hunt.
Left to our own devices, we spent two hours dealing with the aftermath of the sett-blocking in fading light and darkness. Twelve foot sabs equipped with torches searched the whole wooded hillside and found another 15 holes freshly filled with soil so deep the badgers would have suffocated inside if we hadn’t found them. There were fresh spade marks everywhere and hound prints on at least one spoil heap, suggesting that hounds had earlier marked to ground in the sett. The area around some of the holes smelled ‘foxy’ but there was no sign of blood. The terriermen had come out of the woods carrying just a spade and a terrier, no fox carcass. We are hopeful that we interrupted them just in time. It is likely that many of the holes had been filled in early that morning, to prevent a fox from going to ground. We have a lot of footage of this incident which we will be sharing on our page later this week. East Devon Hunt – your card is marked!
