Letter: Is the hunt antique pageantry or sentimental sadism?

ROGER SCRUTON is receptive to the resonances of the spectacle of the hunt to hounds and has a vision of "antique pageantry". ("How to be fair to the fox", 27 December). We cannot quibble with the fact of his imagining. But we might ask him if he has got it right. Is the "pageantry" of the hunt - the stuff of the spectacle that he pictures - really so very "antique", and does a re-engagement with our hunter-gatherer past really need to be bolstered by so much ritual apparatus? In addition, we might remind him that the hunter-gatherer was looking for something to eat.

Scruton presents the hunt in terms of archetypes; the carnivore (dog), the herbivore (horse) and the omnivore (rider) come together in the pack, the herd and society to kill the individual (fox). However, if Scruton will be alert to anachronism, he will note that pageant belongs to a later stage of our evolution than archetype, and hunting to hounds looks quite unlike any sane person's imaginings of the life of our first ancestors.

Rather than putting up a fog of Nature-blather, he might try to think of the hunt emblematically as closer to the spectacle that he actually sees. Pinks and stirrup cups and spurs and so on.

The hunt to hounds, in its ritualised form, is a theatre that does not descend to us from our aboriginal state, but is a representation of more social order. The individual pest remains the invader of the chicken coop and the prey. The rider, who is so ostentatiously aloof, commands the hunt; his horse is his willing servant and the pack is the agent that dispatches the renegade. Of course, the fox lacks the wit and indeed the opportunity to mend its ways.

But as play-acting, the hunt does not address the fox. Whoever will not absorb its message and will not conduct himself within the rules that govern the established relations of landowner, steward and peasantry (omnivore, herbivore and carnivore), will, within the terms of the drama, be forced into the role of the fox and will meet its fate. Toffs, toadies and the mob act out the parts in the dumb-show.

The hunt to hounds is a ritual performed by believers in the big stick. Hunting may indeed be no more immoral than the cruel hypocrisy and sentimentality of those of us who do our gathering of battery-produce at Safeway's or spend excessive amounts on Winalot. But if Scruton and his companions on the hunt will see the true picture within their pageant, they will recognise its bullying reality, its moral ugliness.

JAMES LAWSON

Edinburgh