After hospitalising a sab with a bleed on the brain a few weeks ago, the Avon Vale Hunt were asking for a mass hit. Fourteen of us travelled up the M5 on Saturday to team up with 12 other sab groups from around the country to show solidarity to the injured sab and let the hunt know that violence will only ever backfire on them.
The hunt met at Church Farm in Broughton Gifford and from the police presence residents would be forgiven for thinking the Queen was visiting! Ten Wiltshire police vehicles, including riot vans, plus a police helicopter and an unmarked car with a ‘police liaison team’, were on hand to act as private security for these violent wildlife criminals. If anyone in Wiltshire was a victim of crime on Saturday and struggled to get a response, now you know why!
Sab vehicles were stopped by police, sabs were unlawfully detained on public footpaths, a sab was arrested and later released without charge, and other sabs were threatened with arrest for trespassing. The same police officer who threatened to arrest sabs was earlier seen laughing and shaking hands with members of the hunt. A formal complaint will be made against him and his colleagues.
Whenever the hunt were drawing a covert and flushing wildlife in all directions, police Forward Intelligence Teams had their cameras trained exclusively on sabs. When we asked why they weren’t focusing on the wildlife crimes happening right in front of them, they told us it’s “not the police’s job to say what’s right and what’s wrong”.
Deer, hares and foxes were terrorised all day long while Wiltshire police looked on. They advised us that if we had video evidence of illegal hunting then we should submit that evidence and they would take action “in slow time”. That would be the same evidence they were doing their best to obstruct us from gathering…
At a time when police forces in England have as much of an image problem as the hunts do, you’d think they’d make more of an effort to appear unbiased. The fact they don’t tells you all you need to know about who’s funding their donuts!
Despite the best efforts of Wiltshire’s finest, sabs stuck to the hunt from start til end. We easily outnumbered them and made it impossible for the hunt to kill. Wherever they turned, another group was waiting for them.
The groups we teamed up with were Bristol Hunt Saboteurs, Wiltshire Hunt Sabs, Bath Hunt Saboteurs, South Wales Hunt Saboteurs, Severn Vale Hunt Saboteurs, Mendip Hunt Sabs, Brighton Hunt Saboteurs, South Coast Hunt Sabs, Devon County Hunt Saboteurs, Sheffield Hunt Saboteurs, Surrey Hunt Sabs, and Reading Hunt Saboteurs
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