Every December, towns and villages across the country demonstrate something that anti-hunting activists find deeply inconvenient: Boxing Day meets remain among the most popular and unifying community events of the entire festive season. From Cornwall to Cumbria and every county in between, thousands of local people continue to turn out to enjoy a tradition that is woven into the fabric of rural life.

It is precisely this popularity that drives the annual efforts of anonymous activists to pressure councils into shutting these events down. Anti-hunting activists hate the fact that one local Boxing Day meet can draw more support than the anti-hunting movement can in the whole country.

Their tactics are familiar: orchestrated email campaigns, often from individuals who do not even live in the communities they target, urging councillors to prohibit lawful trail-hunting meets on public land. The unremarkable mid-Devon market town of Tiverton is the latest focus for this obsessive campaign and ridiculously the town council, which has declared the town’s long-standing Boxing Day meet of the Tiverton Foxhounds “not welcome”, does not even have the authority to stop the hunt coming. Even councillors accept that their vote was largely symbolic, but that did not stop them wasting time and effort on it. Ironically the town council comes out of this looking far worse than the hunt having spent hours debating a pointless statement simply to make a ‘symbolic’ gesture.

The Tiverton Hunt has served Mid-Devon for more than 200 years, their many supporters understand the value of that tradition far better than those who attempt to shut it down. I am quite sure that hounds will meet in Tiverton on Boxing Day this year and for many, many years to come.

This pattern repeats itself around the country at this time of year as activists desperately try to hide the popularity of hunts. Two things tend to unite these episodes. First, that anti-hunting activists know they cannot win on the facts so rely on lies. Second that the usual C-list celebrities are wheeled out to influence gullible councillors. Chris Packham is obviously an expert on the local community in Tiverton (although it is doubtful that he actually knows where it is) and has expressed the view that they are “ethically and morally bankrupt sociopathic savages” for supporting the hunt. This is exactly the sort of impartial and intemperate language that successive BBC Director Generals have vowed to crackdown on from BBC staff. What the BBC says, and what the BBC does, have however, never quite joined up.

The good news is that despite the insults, the Tiverton plan to meet at the Half Moon on Boxing Day and if you are in the local area you will almost certainly be safe to drop in for a pint and a bit of hound love without coming across Mr Packham. Meanwhile, I am sure that BBC news at a local and national level will be covering the crowds at Boxing Day meets which will cause plenty of frustration amongst that strange animal rights clique.