As you probably know by now, the government’s consultation on trail hunting closes at midnight tonight (18 June). We know that over 85,000 of you have already submitted a response opposing a ban, but we understand that there have been well over 100,000 submissions in all, so every last response counts to ensure that the weight of opinion is clearly against a trail hunting ban. Trawl your contact list today and find a friend or family member who has not yet taken action and ask them to sign the Future for Hunting e-lobby. Over 20,000 people responded on the first day of the consultation. It would be great to finish with a similar bang.
By our calculations this is already the largest consultation response to Defra in modern times, beating the consultation on the badger cull in 2011 which had 65,000 submissions, the 2018 health and harmony consultation (post-Brexit action plan) at 44,000, fairer food labelling (2025) which had 31,000 and biodiversity net gain (2025/26) with 25,000.
This enormous response shows that, whilst polling consistently confirms that hunting legislation is at the bottom of the list of voters' priorities, people across the country are rallying to the support of the hunting community. Trail hunting might be a relatively niche activity, but the attacks on farming and now game shooting, which it is also seeking to restrict, have pitted the government against the countryside as a whole and few issues are more politically symbolic than hunting.
Most importantly, this huge reaction is an unmissable warning shot fired across the bows of Defra and 10 Downing Street. Whoever the Prime Minister and Defra Secretary are when officials have eventually completed an analysis of the tens of thousands of responses, they will not be able to escape the obvious opposition to the ban and the inevitable political damage that pushing ahead with unjustified and unnecessary legislation would create.
There are rural Labour MPs from Northumberland to West Wales who have been copied into hundreds of consultation responses from their constituents and the last thing many of them will want is a battle over hunting. Meanwhile, if we do have a new Prime Minister later in the year, I cannot believe that he or she will want to start their engagement with the countryside by prioritising legislation that is utterly irrelevant to the lives of most voters. ‘Change’ does not start with culture war in the countryside and a return to the mistakes of the past.
Making political predictions is not a simple business in the current climate but, given the challenges of responding to this consultation and the absence of any hunting or wildlife bill in the King’s Speech, it does look unlikely that we will see any legislation before the second half of next year at the earliest. The government might look very different by then and there will be plenty of time for ministers to consider a change of course. This will also give hunts the opportunity to re-emphasise that they are operating to the highest standards throughout next season.
In the past 12 weeks we have sent a resounding message to Westminster and the country as a whole that we will not allow trail hunting to be banned without a fight. If the government thought that this was going to be a simple walk in the countryside it will have to recalculate.