The new target for the so-called animal lovers at Protect the Wild is the economic fabric of the British countryside – the small, often family-run businesses which are trying to survive in increasingly difficult times.
Protect the Wild has announced it will soon launch a new website, which will be a “searchable database to help us all make informed choices about our spending”. It will list businesses that support hunting with hounds or shooting: “everything from retailers to pubs and hotels, suppliers and digital media”.
What will this look like in reality?
It will encourage boycotts of these businesses which will only serve to further cripple a rural economy that is already on its knees.
It will be accompanied by harassment on social media and in real life, extending to the levelling of abuse against business owners and staff.
It will lead to smear campaigns against these companies, with a multitude of negative reviews left on their websites and social media platforms by people who had never actually been customers.
We know all of this will come because it has happened before, multiple times, to businesses across the country. Behind The Masks has written previously on how sabs are purposefully destroying small businesses. This new website will only serve to further drive these small businesses, run by normal people trying to make an honest living, into the ground.
A taste of what is to come can be seen by one of the comments left on an article explaining Protect the Wild’s new database.
‘Lynda’ is typically misinformed: the practices named by Protect the Wild (trail hunting and shooting) are perfectly legal. And who are the “psychopaths”? Is it the pub landlord who buys and serves pheasants from a local shoot? Or the vet who attends to the welfare of hunting beagles? Perhaps the farrier who shoes the horses for the local hunt?
Any sane person knows these individuals are not psychopaths. They are, in fact, providing essential services, without which rural life cannot continue.
Sabs love nothing so much as a boycott. Last spring they were advocating a boycott of popular Irish crisp company Tayto due to the owner’s hunting links. South Ulster Hunt Saboteurs asked: “Who wants to eat crisps that are stained in the blood of wildlife?”. The sabs had perhaps not considered the vast numbers of animals that are inevitably killed on arable farms by tractors and machinery as well as pesticides and poison.
Tayto Group, however, will likely continue to do fairly well even without the custom of a small band of extremists: its June 2023 accounts showed £250 million in sales the previous year.
This is not the case for hundreds of small businesses across the countryside, however, for whom boycotts are likely to be financially ruinous.
This kind of sab behaviour can also lead to abuse. Last December, Weymouth Animal Rights encouraged the boycott of a small local business Black Cow Vodka.
The group even encouraged its followers to “pop in” to the newly opened bar “to voice your disgust” that its owner takes part in legal trail hunts – which we can only imagine was fairly traumatic for the staff to deal with.
Sabs are also fans of leaving fake negative reviews for businesses that have been tied to hunting, even - or especially – if they have never actually been a customer. This is hugely dishonest and immoral.
Take the Golden Lion in Northallerton. When hunt sabs and their acolytes got wind of the fact the pub was hosting the Hurworth Hunt Ball in January, they flooded its Facebook page with negative reviews, calling it “disgusting” and “scum” – despite never having gone there the place.
One reviewer even admitted the previous (honest) reviews were excellent, saying, “From the various reviews I’ve read this would seem to be a delightful place” - and yet nevertheless tried her utmost to trash the business. At Behind The Masks, we believe the only disgusting behaviour is that.
To make it worse, this comes at a time when pubs up and down the country are seriously 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.
It also seems that the morality involved here is incredibly selective. Will the website list every single supermarket, shop, restaurant, pub and takeaway joint that sells meat or dairy? We presume not.
Why is a restaurant that serves chicken meat from ‘frankenchickens’ or eggs from battery hens (about 35% of all chickens bred for eggs in the UK) preferable to a countryside pub that serves pheasant bought from a local gamekeeper – arguably the most free range of all poultry?
It is sheer hypocrisy.
We urge everyone who, like us, is appalled by this behaviour to use Protect the Wild’s website as a force for good. Find and support those businesses that are holding together the fabric of the British countryside. They will need our help.