CARING FOR KENNELS

Legal changes and trail hunting have placed different pressures on our packs. How are today’s huntsmen responding to the challenges?

- ADRIAN DANGAR

Somewhere in the world there must hang on a wall of a much-blessed house Lionel Edwards’ magnificent 1925 painting of Ernest Bawden laying the Devon & Somerset Staghounds onto the line of an autumn stag on Exmoor. The huntsman is depicted – in the artist’s classic style – as centaur-like deep in the saddle, with the bowler-hatted harbourer close by and the Master, Colonel Wiggin, on the opposite flank. Behind him, a huge field is strung out for a mile or more beneath picturesque Cloutsham Ball, but the painting belongs to some 20 couple of hounds, heads down, sterns up, streaming into the center of the canvas. Were their followers alive today, I wonder what they would think of crossing the same moorland landscape behind just two hounds for, nearly a century later, that is the maximum permitted by the Hunting Act to manage the wild red deer of Exmoor.

“We kept 40 couple to hunt up to four times a week, for nine months of the year, right up until the Act became law,” remembers former Devon & Somerset huntsman Donald Summersgill. “Then, suddenly, we were only allowed to hunt with two at a time and the hounds left at home soon became jealous and started fighting.”