For the second time in a week, Eggesford Hunt returned to Hatherleigh to terrorise wildlife on the County Wildlife Site at Hatherleigh Moor and the surrounding area. This is usually their annual Hatherleigh Carnival meet, and although the carnival committee have finally decided that inviting wildlife criminals to their event isn’t a good look, the hunt still meet in the town square outside the George Inn on carnival day. Based on the conversations we had with locals all around Hatherleigh Moor, most Hatherleigh residents are utterly fed up of the hunt’s presence.

The first hour was spent on the moor, with huntsman Jason Marles casting hounds into very dense covert, exactly the kinds of places where foxes would lie up. You can see several examples of this in our drone shots. Fortunately hounds mostly kept drawing a blank until they got to the edge of the moor at Deckport Farm, where they chased a fox south to Merryland Stream and Becka Moor.

With hounds running ahead in cry, Jason galloped past one of our foot teams on the moor and shouted “that rabbit’s a runner”. Remember this is a hunt that don’t bother with the pretense of trail-hunting. They blatantly hunt foxes and have several criminal convictions and cautions for digging foxes out of badger setts. ‘Rabbit-hunting’ is about as plausible a ruse as trail-hunting is (i.e. completely implausible) and still illegal if done on land without the landowner’s permission. The speed at which Jason and his lackeys were trying to gather hounds back to them north of Becka Moor leads us to suspect they probably didn’t have permission to be on that land!

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