To most Britons – eager to see the best in people – the fact that self-professed animal lovers poison hounds or go out of their way to stop money being given to charities comes as a shock. However, to those in the hunt community we know this is only scratching the surface of so-called saboteurs' deplorable behaviour.
No longer content with starting punch-ups in hedgerows, hunt saboteurs have begun to terrorize rural businesses, threatening the owners and bombarding them with bad reviews in an attempt to put them out of business for being associated with local hunts.
The phenomenon was reported on by The Times in 2017 but has only grown as more pubs and restaurants rely on social media to advertise and make bookings. Now, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, saboteurs are holding local communities hostage to their radical agenda.
In 2017, the Crown & Plough, an independent countryside pub in Long Clawson, Leicestershire, received an onslaught of online criticism from suspected saboteurs for the unforgiveable crime of hosting some local hunts for lunch.
These charming sentiments were accompanied by one-star reviews, decreasing the public house’s overall rating on Facebook. Worse still, landlady Jo Towle received numerous threatening phone calls from sabs after she agreed to host a pie night for the Belvoir hunt.
A similar incident occurred in May 2023 when an animal rights activist tarred the Manor House Inn near Callington, Cornwall, with one star reviews on trip advisor. The pub’s chef, Joss Beechim Horton told The Sunday Telegraph, “I feel worried about how much damage he could do… We work very hard and barely scraped through the pandemic. Now with spiraling costs, I fear that he has the ability to affect our trade.”
This sickening behaviour comes at a time when pubs up and down the country are struggling, particularly in rural areas. More than 500 pubs closed for good in Britain last year, equating to a loss of 6,000 jobs. Young people often struggle to find work in the countryside at the best of times and hunt saboteurs aren’t making it any easier.
Tragically, the sabs stole a win in 2022 after an unprecedented barrage of online abuse against the Jamaica Inn in Bodmin, Cornwall. Immortalised by the 1936 Daphne Du Maurier novel of the same name, the Jamaica Inn used to host the East Cornwall Hunt. In March 2022, after the East Cornwall invited the Beaufort Hunt to meet there on a Saturday, the Jamaica Inn faced an extensive onslaught of online abuse from sabs, causing the Inn irreparable damage from false reviews that were equally imbued with false claims about hunting:
These are only some of the multitude of abusive reviews. Meanwhile, it is abundantly clear that the majority of these extremists do not even live in Cornwall and had probably never been to the Jamaica Inn – which is usually a prerequisite for leaving a review. The sheer volume of abuse and bogus reviews forced the pub into a corner, leaving the Jamaica Inn no choice but to make a public statement saying that they would refuse to host anymore hunts, despite the legality of the trail hunting which the East Cornwall practiced.
The sad diagnosis is once again the same: the core majority of die-hard sabs care little for wildlife, but are motivated solely by class-warfare and the desire to destroy British tradition. The good folk of Bodmin, most of whom either respect or are not concerned about the tradition of hunting, have seen their local bullied by a group of bedroom slacktivists from miles across the country, who know little-to-nothing of rural life and its history, especially in Bodmin.
If these sabs were so concerned with animal rights, you’d expect them to fly to Iran or Belarus, which have two of the lowest Voiceless Animal Cruelty Indexes (VACI) in the world, rather than press-gang a rural pub into economic hardship. Though it’s unlikely that criminal thugs like Paul Allman, Andrew Purbrick, and Marc Shaw have the stomach for such a morally valiant cause.
It’s not just pubs that come in the crosshairs of the saboteurs either. Around the same time as the Crown & Plough incident in February 2017, another coordinated attack was carried out against the Holcombe Hunt’s charity ball.
On 4 February, over 300 people were forced to evacuate the Dunkenhalgh Hotel in Clayton-le-Moors after a false warning of a bomb at the hotel, which was hosting the Holcombe Hunt’s annual black-tie ball and trying to make an honest living in a difficult market. Threats of bombing, however, are not out of the question for these sabs, especially given the terror-inspired likes of Mel Broughton and David Blenkinsop in their ranks.
One of the senior hunt masters commented at the time that “the call was made to disrupt a major hotel trade. It’s propaganda, it’s intimidation and it’s trying to get businesses to suffer.”
The same hunt master added: “We are all operating within the law and we are maintaining the heritage of hunting in Britain because of all the benefits that it adds to rural trade.”
The lack of perspective is breathtaking. Hunts support local business; sabs attempt to destroy it. It is the same as the saboteur stance on hunt-related charities. Hunts support charities; sabs prevent charity. The contradiction is screaming out, yet some people are still blinded by the moral façade.
Action needs to be taken against the decrying, unverified noise of a loud, online minority. Perhaps it’s time the government reviewed the online safety bill to stop these impassioned and deceptive sabs from threatening closure to anymore local businesses for the benefit of their own unrelated ideological views through leaving reviews unconnected to given businesses’ functions.