Originally Suffolk Against Foxhunting, Suffolk Action for Wildlife (SAF) was created in 2021 by Anna Bye as a volunteer-based hunt monitoring and disrupting organisation. The group is still chaired by Bye, a local mortgage broking business owner, and now covers most of Suffolk, helping local hunt saboteur organisations to disrupt legal hunts. Behind The Masks can now reveal that one of SAF’s group members was convicted in 2015 of killing a pensioner in a careless driving incident.
Anna Bye
Bye is the daughter of a prominent hunting family and grew up in the hunting community. Her late father, Geoffrey Bye, who died in 2008, was a farmer and a keen hunting enthusiast who chaired the Essex and Suffolk Hunt Supporters' Club for several years. Her mother, who is still alive, was Master of the Hunt in the 1980s.
Bye reports going on her first fox hunt at the age of eight. Five decades later, she regularly disrupts the legal Essex and Suffolk Hunt—the very group she used to ride with as a child.
”I know them all - not well, but I know them all," Bye says of the hunt participants in a recent East Anglian News Daily profile.
Bye, however, chose to ‘rebel’ in her early twenties by becoming a mortgage broker; she’s now the owner of Prospect Mortgage Brokers in Ipswich. Bye rebelled against her parents again when she launched Suffolk Action for Wildlife, which she chairs to this day.
The group has about 2,000 Facebook followers and a core of volunteers who attend hunts with hunt saboteur organisations, including Norwich Hunt Saboteurs, North London Hunt Saboteurs, South Suffolk Hunt Sabs Group, South Norfolk Hunt Saboteurs, Suffolk/Norfolk Hunt Saboteurs and the Suffolk and Essex Hunt Sabs.
The group heads out two or three times a week, often with the Suffolk and Essex Hunt Saboteurs. Bye believes the group is ”hugely successful" and has made the hunting community reflect on its practices.
The group's mission statement is to “protect wildlife from bloodsport through peaceful direct action…protecting wildlife all year round.” We at Behind The Masks would only wish they were more careful with human life.
Wright of Way
One devoted member of SAF, Tracey Wright, was convicted by Ipswich Crown Court in 2015 for causing death by careless driving after running over 75-year-old Christine Ward.
Wright’s defence for mowing down the mother of four, grandmother of eight, foster parent and charity worker was simply that she “didn’t see her.”
Mrs Ward, pushing her suitcase on the wheeled walker she used to assist her, had almost completed crossing a road one afternoon in Sudburgh when she was struck down by Wright’s Honda Jazz and landed on the pavement.
The judge said of the case, “It is hard to know why [Wright] did not see her before colliding with her. This is a case of careless driving not from momentary loss of attention but a few moments attention.”
Unfortunately, this level of carelessness and violence is not exceptional for the Suffolk-based wildlife group. SAF’s connections with a number of Suffolk and Norfolk-based sab groups, with whom they often disrupt legal hunts, show a pattern of poor judgement and lack of respect for human life.
Behind The Masks recently unmasked sab Sally Field, a member of the Suffolk/Norfolk Hunt Saboteurs, a group known to disrupt hunts alongside SAF. Field, who was filmed aggressively shoving a huntsman and trying to push him to the floor. Sources tell us another of Field’s sabbing tactics involves disorienting hounds by playing recordings to deliberately confuse them.
Cyber Bullies
Like many sab groups, SAF is also partial to denigrating local businesses that are even slightly associated with legal trail hunts. They do this in the cowardly fashion of Facebook reviews. In one instance, the group targeted up-and-coming artist Joe Keeley, leaving a negative review on his music page after telling him he shouldn’t perform at a particular local pub because of their supposed association with the local hunt. Keeley rightly responded that he wouldn’t let the debate around trail hunting “get in the way of paying his rent”. These actions are not only damaging to the early career of an aspiring artist but also risk hurting the local pub, which supports local livelihoods in an already struggling industry.
Anna Bye’s connections with dangerous hunt saboteurs and her group’s inexplicable, menacing road presence seem a far cry from the ‘peaceful direct action’ promised on their Facebook page.