Eggesford Hunt are not welcome in Monkokehampton and Ingleigh Green
The annual fox cub killing spree has started. The hunting world would like us all to refer to it simply as ‘autumn hunting’, to hide the cruel reality of their ‘sport’. Acting on a tipoff, a small team of sabs paid a visit to Eggesford Hunt’s cubbing meet at Ingleigh Green on Saturday evening, where it turns out most of the locals despise the hunt.
They met at 6pm in a field belonging to Peter Fishleigh of Lower Ingleigh and spent the next two hours mostly hunting on land they had no permission to be on, according to practically every farmer and landowner we came across. Two sabs followed Jason and his whipper-in Jade on foot, while we also filmed the hunt from the air by drone. We documented plenty of evidence of hunt supporters driving their vehicles into crop fields against the farmers’ wishes, huntsman Jason Marles casting hounds into hedges next to horse paddocks, causing those horses to freak out, and hounds hunting through some of the densest scrub you could imagine. We’ll share a short video soon to give you an idea of what foot sabs had to wade through to follow the route taken by the pack.
“The hunt told us they’ve laid a trail” were the words of a police patrol team who stopped to speak to sabs on the road but never bothered to see for themselves what the hounds were up to while they were audibly in cry in the valley, or to speak to the landowners who had to cancel their Saturday evening plans to try and chase the hunt off. This comes just weeks after one of the Eggesford terriermen, Danny Pearce, was handed a police caution for digging out a protected badger sett on land the Eggesford had no permission to be on last season.
Jason drew maize fields, waist-high cover crop, dense woodland at Beerland, Bude and Mount Pleasant, and the steep bramble-covered slopes of Beerland Wood. Hounds spoke on and off and at one point the pack split. Some hounds went west and marked a fox to ground at an earth in dense brambles. A sab waded deep into the brambles to push hounds out of the hole and protect the fox who had taken refuge there. Another fox was seen in a neighbouring field but hounds lost the scent. A further small sett was marked unbeknownst to Jason, and sabs were able to protect this sett from being dug out. Jason eventually retraced his route back towards the meet with sabs following closely behind.
It was a very warm evening. Hounds took every opportunity to lie in and drink from the stream in the valley, while terrierman Tom Bounsall’s poor terriers were stuck in a box on his quadbike. Reese Windsor and James Skull took it in turns on another quad, recklessly ragging it around the lanes at breakneck speed. Four separate landowners came to ask us what on earth was going on and why the hunt were all over the place without permission. Two of them mentioned that James Skull had a reputation for nicking things and they didn’t want him anywhere near their land.
While the criminal Eggesford Hunt were invited to parade their hounds at the North Devon Show just last week, it’s good to see concerned locals and responsible landowners standing up to them and thanking us for our efforts.
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