The complexities of hunting in rural England and Wales

The recent ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ March in London highlights how the issue of hunting with dogs, which directly involves only a small minority of people in the British countryside and, opinion polls indicate, is opposed by the majority of the British population, can still dominate national political and media agendas. A key tactic of the March organisers, the Countryside Alliance, was to present hunting as an embedded part of rural life, emphasising important connections between natural discourses of rurality, hunting and broader rural social issues.It is these claimed embedded natures of hunting in rural areas that form the focus of this paper. Drawing on recent research in four case-study hunting areas in the English and Welsh countryside, the paper positions hunting within a broader rural socio-cultural context. It explores community understandings of and interactions with hunting, and considers the broader sociocultural role of hunting in these rural spaces. The case-studies indicate that while hunting may be described as a socially and culturally embedded practice in these areas, its place within the rural community is bound up with a great deal of social and spatial complexity