Friedrich Engels co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx. As such, he ought to be one of history’s most reviled men. Marxism, after all, led to the deaths of tens of millions of our fellow human beings. And yet I have a soft spot for the old commie.
Because, even though he glares back at us from early black and white photographs - an archetype of austere Victorian earnestness, complete with vast black beard and starched white collar - Engels was no killjoy.
And his greatest enjoyment came, not from ruminating on class struggle and the iniquities of the bourgeoisie, but from a far simpler sensation. From sitting on a horse. Not just being in the saddle, but riding to hounds. In other words, the German philosopher who was one-half of the project which gave the world class struggle was a devotee of English fox-hunting.
Not my words, but his.
Famously, after one memorable day in the field with the Cheshire Hunt in the 1850s, Engels described having enjoyed “The greatest physical pleasure it is possible to know”. I thought about that quotation after watching my local hunt in Wiltshire head off on New Year’s Day.
Amid all the arguments about banning trail hunting, one is routinely ignored. And that is the question of pleasure. Not necessarily the enjoyment of riders, but horses.
Because what those who have never hunted will never know, is that domesticated horses love trail-hunting. They cannot articulate the depth of their pleasure, as Engels could.
But anyone who has watched a horse stamping the ground with excitement at the ‘music’ made by hounds, or quivering in anticipation when a hunting horn is blown, knows this to be true.
Horses are flight animals. In the natural world, they roam as a herd. In a built-up country like ours, outside of relatively safe spaces like the New Forest, this natural behaviour is impossible. Urban foxes may run wild, urban horses never could.
But out hunting, it’s a different story. They pursue a pack of hounds, which is, in turn, following a scent. Before the Hunting Act of 2004, this was the smell of a fox at bay.
Now it is a trail laid with a sponge by a human being. For a horse, the distinction is void. For them, it is not about the quarry, but the chase. A chase in the company of animals just like them.
I know this to be true because I’ve seen it happen. I grew up in Bradford, a city not known for its rural traditions. But after a media career in London, my late wife and I moved to the countryside.
She was from a family with equestrian roots, and, as a couple, we made a strategic parenting decision to embrace the whole ‘nag thing’. We figured it would keep our five daughters out of trouble.
Labour's trail hunting ban is the first shot fired in a class war against a much bigger prey - Colin Brazier
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After years of driving a horse lorry around miscellaneous country lanes, delivering ponies and children in search of rosettes, I decided I’d had enough of being a groom.
Against the advice of friends, I bought myself an old steeplechaser. I was working at Sky TV at the time, and doing a morning show. It meant I could be back for a post-commute ride most days. Having never ridden as a child, and taking the reins in my 40s as a total novice, I was able to rapidly accumulate lots of flying hours,
Then I read a book which changed my life. It was a thin volume by the philosopher Roger Scruton entitled ‘On Hunting’. In it, he describes huntsmen and women who behave more like centaurs than riders, so in tune with their mounts are they.
And riders from - and I hesitate to use the word - a ‘diverse’ set of backgrounds. Yes, toffs. But plumbers and nurses and, in one case, a man who ran a nightclub in Swindon. All of this was a revelation to those who, like me, had no knowledge of this strange, distant subculture.
And Scruton himself might never have discovered it, were it not for a day when he was out hacking (riding alone, taking things easy). He was on an ageing pony called ‘Dumbo’, steady, sedate, safe (“bomb-proof” is the description horsey-folk would use).
Dumbo sees the local hunt stream by and is, in an instant, transformed. The dobbin between Scruton’s legs, ambling home for his hay, becomes a ball of energy and takes off after hirelings and hunters twice his size.
Scruton is eventually thrown to the ground (he was, by all accounts, a pretty poor rider who, even into his seventies, was still breaking bones), but not before he realised that hunting was not just a social occasion for riders. It was a thrill like no other for the horses involved, too.
This is not an argument you will hear advanced all that often. But I cite it because those who would ban trail-hunting usually see it in binary terms. A straight choice between the welfare of animals and the (warped) interests of people.
As in so many aspects of the fox-hunting debate of the early 2000s, it’s never that simple (which is one of the reasons even Tony Blair, prime minister when the hunting ban was brought in, said he regretted the decision).
In fact, it is impossible to understand how hunting works without recognising quite a lot of cognitive dissonance on the part of those who hunt. In my experience, people who ride to hounds love what they do to an almost unnatural degree. They love it so much that they are willing to risk their necks doing so once or twice a week.
They share the danger with their horse. Inspired by Roger Scruton, I discovered this myself. I rode to hounds with the local hunt, not prolifically, but enough to know that, as Engels did, there is no thrill to compare.
That it is a thrill sharpened by the prospect of pain and oblivion (I fell off often; it hurts). And that, for all that horse riders find the experience utterly transcendent, the horse is in its element too.
This is where the cognitive dissonance comes in. Those who hunt often seem to value the safety of their horse above their own. And yet, when it comes to the crunch, the horse is expendable.
The end of a horse does not mean the end of hunting for a rider. Abolitionists struggle with this. How can it be possible to love a thing and yet misuse a thing?
Holding these two - seemingly contradictory - ideas to be simultaneously true is at the core of hunting. Not just with horses. Game-bird shooters are often enthusiastic twitchers too.
Those who want to ban hunting cannot set aside and get beyond this black and white, Manichaean world-view. They exhibit what Churchill described as all the hallmarks of the fanatic: someone who can’t change the subject and won’t change his mind.
And, because they are fanatics who cannot comprehend (and more importantly, tolerate) how other people think, they won’t stop with a ban on trail-hunting.
Many of the hunt saboteurs and their ideological fellow-travellers on the Labour backbenches won’t disband when they get their way. They will look for the next ban.
It could be any relationship between humans and a domesticated animal which, to their mind, involves coercion. That might be any form of horse-riding. It could be simply walking a dog on a lead (Labour’s new animal welfare strategy will ban shock collars, which is a straw in the wind).
They are missing a sensibility, a prism through which they can make sense of things. Hunting, for them, belongs to Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns'.
They have never done it, and cannot begin to understand how it really works. They just want it stopped. They channel the class warfare of Engels, without any of the nuance which came naturally to him.
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