The animal rights mob have met their match in Jeremy Clarkson
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It was perhaps only a matter of time before animal rights campaigners started targeting Jeremy Clarkson’s business premises, given the Amazon Prime star’s knack of telling inconvenient truths about the environment and challenging the leftist narrative.
His Hawkstone Brewery was besieged, because Clarkson had allowed The Heythrop Hunt onto his land, and he had also allegedly allowed an official badger cull on his farm.
But, why wouldn’t he? Both are entirely legal activities supported by a majority of the rural community in the Cotswolds. Hunting runs deep in local culture. And his Clarkson’s Farm series highlighted the misery inflicted on farming families by bovine TB.
There is an argument that writing about this only gives the wider animal rights movement the publicity they crave, while potentially leading to further intimidation of farmers and huntsmen. Yet given where we are in the electoral cycle, this type of activity needs calling out.
Vigilante groups are using bullying tactics which they justify with self-appropriated moral superiority. They ignore how the Hunting Act – a bad piece of legislation and one which Tony Blair later said he regretted most – has led to more foxes being killed by less natural methods. Bad government policy, meanwhile, has led to TB spiralling out of control, and consequently increased badger culling to get on top of a zoonotic disease that afflicts not just cattle but also humans and wildlife.
Many animal rights activists don’t seem to care. Nor do they appear too bothered about wasting police time, not just as officers have to deal with incidents in the hunting field, but with their targeting of a man who does not hunt himself, is perfectly entitled to invite the local equestrian community to hunt trails across his land if he wishes, and has only complied with government policy over the badger cull.
Jeremy Clarkson has broader shoulders than most and the protesters outside his brewery looked peaceful (the kind of people the television star might characterise as badger huggers).
But there are some hunt saboteurs with a frightening history of violence and criminal damage, meaning that any possible threat must be taken seriously.
Activists may have been further emboldened by the Labour Party talking up plans to ban “all forms of hunting” if they win power. Some are thought to have ties to far-left organisations. Meanwhile, after 14 years in power, the Tories have done very little to turn back the war waged on rural culture by the Blair government. Talk about cracking down on hunt saboteurs has been mostly just that, talk. But this surely runs the risk that some activists will feel they can harass and intimidate without consequence.
As we enter another election period it is worth reflecting on the fact that hunting remains very popular. The sizeable rural minority who still support their local hunts is as big as it ever was during the bitter parliamentary battles at the start of the century. Country people have shown that they will not be cowed by intimidation. And politicians would be well advised to dial down the rhetoric and engender a spirit of live and let live.
Jamie Blackett is a farmer and the author of ‘Red Rag to a Bull’ and ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ (Quiller)
