Call for Government to review hunting & legislation

A political paper urges policymakers to act, and considers how a ban on trail-hunting would affect the country

- LUCY ELDER

THE Government has been urged to appoint an independent body to review legislation and find if the Hunting Act should be amended, repealed or retained.

Political briefing paper Broken Countryside is by environmental writer Charlie Pye-Smith and animal welfare consultant Jim Barrington.

It is a summary of the “Rural Wrongs” project, in which the authors set out to investigate how the Hunting Act has affected formerly hunted species. The pair spoke to those involved in countryside management and consulted scientists studying fox, deer and hare populations.

Those findings were published in 2023 in the book Rural Wrongs: Hunting and the Unintended Consequences of Bad Law, reprinted in 2025.

The paper states that the aim is to “inform legislators and others about how the 2004 Hunting Act has made life worse for animals and people”.