Editorial: Northern Ireland should not follow England's hunting ban, which did not protect foxes

​Fox hunting is technically legal in Northern Ireland, as it is in the Republic, but it is an almost extinct activity.​

The number of participants is small, the number of hunts likewise and there are hurdles for hunts including hunt saboteurs and getting insurance.

Two years ago, in late 2021, Stormont narrowly rejected a hunt ban. The vote, in which the great majority of MLAs took part, divided 45 to 38 against a prohibition in the province. Most Sinn Fein and DUP politicians opposed a ban.

The Alliance Agriculture and Environment spokesperson John Blair MLA, who hopes to table a bill against hunting with dogs “at the first opportunity” if the assembly returns calls hunts “cruel and outdated”.

But such activists are naive about nature and the animal kingdom which is, by human standards, spectacularly cruel. Foxes are predators, as indeed are birds such as crows,

And now there is solid evidence, from the near 20 years in which hunting was banned in England and Wales, that landowners have resorted to shooting foxes to control the population, and this has in fact led to a catastrophic decline in fox numbers.

More than 100 vets have written to the government to launch a scientific review into population control.

That 2004 legislation was introduced by a Labour Party that had little sympathy with, or understanding of, the views of people who live in and work on the countryside. Northern Ireland is a rural society, so we can and should do better than that when drafting major legislation.

The former agriculture minister Edwin Poots in the assembly is right to warn about the dangers of unintended consequences in a hunting ban here that follows the failed route of England and Wales, which imposed a solution on country dwellers.