Hunting & Fishing
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 1994:
Hounds from the Huntingdon Valley Hunt,
of Furlong, Pennsylvania, chased a number of cats
belonging to Glenda Hilgar of Forest Grove on one of
their first fox hunts of the year, September 28, tearing
the one cat they caught to pieces before her eyes. One
member of the hunt was present. “I was screaming at her
to get the hounds out of here and all she was doing was
cracking the whip,” Hilgar told Walter Naedele of the
Philadelphia Inquirer. When Hilgar grabbed rider Lidie
Peace’s walkie-talkie to call the police, “she got me in
the back with the whip, four times.” Peace was charged
with assault. “These are very unusual, isolated inci-
dents,” said Huntingdon Valley Hunt president Stephen
B. Harris, an attorney. Two weeks later, however, the
hounds attacked farmer Nancy Haskey’s sheep, stamped-
ing them through a pond and a fence before killing two
lambs. Denying the lambs were mauled, Harris said they
were just bitten.
Prince Charles of Britain took sons William,
12, and Harry, 10, to their first fox hunt on October 26,
reportedly over the objections of Princess Diana. Charles’
predilection for hunting––and his having taken the boys to
shoot rabbits over Diana’s opposition last year––is appar-
ently a chief source of the public friction between them.
The first moose killed during Vermont’s sec-
ond moose season was shot 11 minutes before the three-
day season actually opened. Forty permit holders killed
28 moose; last year, 30 permit holders killed 25.
Concerned that a party calling itself Hunting
Fishing Nature Tradition won almost 4% of the votes in
recent European Parliament elections, and that spooked
legislators then rejected the recommendation of wildlife
experts that they should shorten the migratory bird season,
five French animal protection groups have united to form
a new legislative front, the Alliance of Opposition to
Hunting. Their first goal will be to seek enforcement of
an existing but often ignored ban on use of leghold traps.
Newly imposed taxes on nonresident hunting
in Romania have raised the cost of killing a pheasant to
$66, waterfowl to $100 each, boars to $2,000 each, and
bears to $8,000 each. Even at that, hunting lodges are
reportedly doing a roaring business. Romanians pay $58
for a boar and $235 for a bear.
John D. Murphy, 31, of Queens, New York,
may face negligent homicide charges for the November
17 deaths of Meredith McDonnell, 24, her near-term
unborn child, and Ann Pickett, 24, all of Hudson Falls,
New York. Murphy apparently capped a day of bowhunt-
ing with heavy drinking, then hit the victims’ car head-on.
The Common Council of Ithaca, New York,
unanimously banned hunting within city limits on Nov. 2.
Police in Edinburgh, Scotland, are reportedly
probing Sunlight Systems, a firm set up in 1980 with
$90,000 in government aid, which sells $2.5 million a
year worth of cannabis seeds as “fish bait.” The “bait”
costs $6.50 per seed.
