Tory plans to repeal it
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#181 
by The_Metatron » May 22, 2015 4:36 pm
Teague wrote:Give me a rifle and I'll bag you 20 foxes in a day but even if I got only 6, which is what someone quoted as a number these hunts grab, then that's still 6 x 30 hunters. Once again, there is no reason to hunt with dogs unless you're a sick fuck.
#182 by Briton » May 22, 2015 5:23 pm
Owdhat wrote:There are a lot of cruel sports that we should be glad to see the back of though some still flourish underground quite happily.
Owdhat wrote:But the fact is a lot of people get a buzz from hunting and its not just about seeing animals dying there is a whole social aspect that isn't going to be made to evaporate with a few laws.
#183 by Owdhat » May 22, 2015 7:08 pm
Paul wrote:Owdhat wrote:There are a lot of cruel sports that we should be glad to see the back of though some still flourish underground quite happily. But the fact is a lot of people get a buzz from hunting and its not just about seeing animals dying there is a whole social aspect that isn't going to be made to evaporate with a few laws.
But that's one of the key points. It (the social side) hasn't gone away, the hunts have made much of increased membership in the past 10 years, and they still go out drag hunting. The claims by the pro-hunt lobby that the ban would result in the putting down of their dogs and horses, that people who looked after the animals would be unemployed, that the whole fabric of rural life would be torn asunder, were outright lies and scaremongering. They're still chasing round the countryside, they just want to be able to set their dogs on a fox now and again, just for the lulz apparently.
#184 by Calilasseia » May 22, 2015 11:37 pm
#185 by Agi Hammerthief » May 23, 2015 1:48 am
Strontium Dog wrote:Owdhat wrote:The Fox will end up dead one way or the other. Whilst who knows how much donation money is being diverted away from worthy projects.
Of course, they're not concerned about dead foxes anyway, any more than the hordes of miscreants who scrawled all over war memorials last week are concerned about government spending cuts. It's just a flimsy excuse to stir up trouble, with the bonus that they can indulge in some class warfare at the same time.
#186 by Byron » May 23, 2015 5:31 am
Fallible wrote:I don't know why there hasn't, Byron. Additionally, I have no idea why this is relevant in a discussion on fox hunting which the government would like to re-introduced, constituting not only the kill, but the chase, which is an integral part of fox hunting. Your post here is starting to look a bit like 'look over there', but I can't work out why you'd be doing that.
As for the 'class war rhetoric', it is possible to object to something on several grounds; the class aspect might have something to do with the way the hunters behave when out on a hunt, trespassing on the property of the great unwashed and killing their pets if either should get in the way of their fun. Basically, acting like they own the place and breaking the law. If any other level of society did that they'd at the very least be asked some serious questions.
#187 by Briton » May 23, 2015 7:08 am
Byron wrote:
If trespassing's an issue in hunts, there needs to be stronger laws/enforcement against trespass.
#188 by ED209 » May 23, 2015 7:22 am
#189 by Fallible » May 23, 2015 9:49 am
Byron wrote:Fallible wrote:I don't know why there hasn't, Byron. Additionally, I have no idea why this is relevant in a discussion on fox hunting which the government would like to re-introduced, constituting not only the kill, but the chase, which is an integral part of fox hunting. Your post here is starting to look a bit like 'look over there', but I can't work out why you'd be doing that.
I'm not: I gave my position in the first post (currently, more restrictions). As the thread was pretty one-sided, I explored various aspects of the issue, while making my own POV clear.
As for the 'class war rhetoric', it is possible to object to something on several grounds; the class aspect might have something to do with the way the hunters behave when out on a hunt, trespassing on the property of the great unwashed and killing their pets if either should get in the way of their fun. Basically, acting like they own the place and breaking the law. If any other level of society did that they'd at the very least be asked some serious questions.
If trespassing's an issue in hunts, there needs to be stronger laws/enforcement against trespass. It's not necessarily an argument against fox hunting.
#190 by Fallible » May 23, 2015 9:56 am
Strontium Dog wrote:Blip wrote:Campaigning against fox hunting doesn't preclude an individual from campaigning for other causes, be they environmental, wider animal welfare or otherwise.
Does it not stand to reason that expending energy on one thing limits the amount of energy you can expend on other things?
I could think of 50 more deserving animal-related causes that attract less support than mangy foxes.
No prizes for guessing why that is.
#191 by Nostalgia » May 24, 2015 1:14 am
#192 by The_Metatron » May 24, 2015 3:09 am
#193 by Briton » May 24, 2015 8:21 am
MacIver wrote:Fox hunting is the deliberate attempt to get two or more canines to fight and kill each other. Dog baiting is illegal and should fucking well remain so. End of.
Any talk of "posh toffs" from one side or "class warfare" from the other is utterly irrelevant.
#194 by Calilasseia » May 24, 2015 4:49 pm
The_Metatron wrote:Dude, foxes aren't canines. Still a valid point.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Trut, 1999 wrote:When scientists ponder how animals came to be domesticated, they almost inevitably wind up thinking about dogs. The dog was probably the first domestic animal, and it is the one in which domestication has progressed the furthest—far enough to turn Canis lupus into Canis familiaris. Evolutionary theorists have long speculated about exactly how dogs’ association with human beings may have been linked to their divergence from their wild wolf forebears, a topic that anthropologist Darcy Morey has discussed in some detail in the pages of this magazine (July–August 1994).
Trut, 1999 wrote:In many ways, though, the question of intentionality is beside the point. Domestication was not a single event but rather a long, complex process. Natural selection and artificial selection may both have operated at different times or even at the same time. For example, even if prehistoric people deliberately set out to domesticate wolves, natural selection would still have been at work. The selective regime may have changed drastically when wolves started living with people, but selective pressure continued regardless of anything Homo sapiens chose to do.
Another problem with the debate over intentionality is that it can overshadow other important questions. For example, in becoming domesticated, animals have undergone a host of changes in morphology, physiology and behavior. What do those changes have in common? Do they stem from a single cause, and if so, what is it? In the case of the dog, Morey identifies one common factor as pedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits by adults. Those traits include both morphological ones, such as skulls that are unusually broad for their length, and behavioral ones, such as whining, barking and submissiveness—all characteristics that wolves outgrow but that dogs do not. Morey considers p edomorphosis in dogs a by-product of natural selection for earlier sexual maturity and smaller body size, features that, according to evolutionary theory, ought to increase the fitness of animals engaged in colonizing a new ecological niche.
The common patterns are not confined to a single species. In a wide range of mammals— herbivores and predators, large and small— domestication seems to have brought with it strikingly similar changes in appearance and behavior: changes in size, changes in coat color, even changes in the animals’ reproductive cycles. Our research group at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia, has spent decades investigating such patterns and other questions of the early evolution of domestic animals. Our work grew out of the interests and ideas of the late director of our institute, the geneticist Dmitry K. Belyaev.
Like Morey, Belyaev believed that the patternsof changes observed in domesticated animals resulted from genetic changes that occurred in the course of selection. Belyaev, however, believed that the key factor selected for was not size or reproduction, but behavior—specifically amenability to domestication, or tamability. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tamability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among human beings. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body’s hormones and neurochemicals. Those changes, in turn, could have had far-reaching effects on the development of the animals themselves, effects that might well explain why different animals would respond in similar ways when subjected to the same kinds of selective pressures.
To test his hypothesis, Belyaev decided to turn back the clock to the point at which animals received the first challenge of domestication. By replaying the process, he would be able to see how changes in behavior, physiology and morphology first came about. Of course, reproducing the ways and means of those ancient transformations, even in the roughest outlines, would be a formidable task. To keep things as clear and simple as possible, Belyaev designed a selective-breeding program to reproduce a single major factor, strong selection pressure for tamability. He chose as his experimental model a species taxonomically close to the dog but never before domesticated: Vulpes vulpes, the silver fox. Belyaev’s fox-breeding experiment occupied the last 26 years of his life. Today, 14 years after his death, it is still in progress.
Through genetic selection alone, our research group has created a population of tame foxes fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. In the process we have observed some striking changes in physiology, morphology and behavior, which mirror the changes known in other domestic animals and bear out many of Belyaev’s ideas.
#195 by DarthHelmet86 » May 24, 2015 4:54 pm
#196 by Onyx8 » May 24, 2015 4:59 pm
#197 by The_Metatron » May 24, 2015 5:33 pm
Calilasseia wrote:The_Metatron wrote:Dude, foxes aren't canines. Still a valid point.
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They're pretty close relatives in the Family Canidae though.[Reveal] Spoiler:Plus, experiments have been conducted by a Russian scientist, selectively breeding red foxes for tameness. Dmitri Belayev, a Russian geneticist, succeeded in producing a tame strain of red foxes after just 10 generations of selective breeding, an experiment that has an impact upon the possible domestication route that led to the domestic dog.
The scientific paper describing this experiment is this one:
Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment by Lyudmilla M. Trut, American Scientist, 87: 160-169 (March & April 1999)Trut, 1999 wrote:When scientists ponder how animals came to be domesticated, they almost inevitably wind up thinking about dogs. The dog was probably the first domestic animal, and it is the one in which domestication has progressed the furthest—far enough to turn Canis lupus into Canis familiaris. Evolutionary theorists have long speculated about exactly how dogs’ association with human beings may have been linked to their divergence from their wild wolf forebears, a topic that anthropologist Darcy Morey has discussed in some detail in the pages of this magazine (July–August 1994).
Further on, the author writes:Trut, 1999 wrote:In many ways, though, the question of intentionality is beside the point. Domestication was not a single event but rather a long, complex process. Natural selection and artificial selection may both have operated at different times or even at the same time. For example, even if prehistoric people deliberately set out to domesticate wolves, natural selection would still have been at work. The selective regime may have changed drastically when wolves started living with people, but selective pressure continued regardless of anything Homo sapiens chose to do.
Another problem with the debate over intentionality is that it can overshadow other important questions. For example, in becoming domesticated, animals have undergone a host of changes in morphology, physiology and behavior. What do those changes have in common? Do they stem from a single cause, and if so, what is it? In the case of the dog, Morey identifies one common factor as pedomorphosis, the retention of juvenile traits by adults. Those traits include both morphological ones, such as skulls that are unusually broad for their length, and behavioral ones, such as whining, barking and submissiveness—all characteristics that wolves outgrow but that dogs do not. Morey considers p edomorphosis in dogs a by-product of natural selection for earlier sexual maturity and smaller body size, features that, according to evolutionary theory, ought to increase the fitness of animals engaged in colonizing a new ecological niche.
The common patterns are not confined to a single species. In a wide range of mammals— herbivores and predators, large and small— domestication seems to have brought with it strikingly similar changes in appearance and behavior: changes in size, changes in coat color, even changes in the animals’ reproductive cycles. Our research group at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Siberia, has spent decades investigating such patterns and other questions of the early evolution of domestic animals. Our work grew out of the interests and ideas of the late director of our institute, the geneticist Dmitry K. Belyaev.
Like Morey, Belyaev believed that the patternsof changes observed in domesticated animals resulted from genetic changes that occurred in the course of selection. Belyaev, however, believed that the key factor selected for was not size or reproduction, but behavior—specifically amenability to domestication, or tamability. More than any other quality, Belyaev believed, tamability must have determined how well an animal would adapt to life among human beings. Because behavior is rooted in biology, selecting for tameness and against aggression means selecting for physiological changes in the systems that govern the body’s hormones and neurochemicals. Those changes, in turn, could have had far-reaching effects on the development of the animals themselves, effects that might well explain why different animals would respond in similar ways when subjected to the same kinds of selective pressures.
To test his hypothesis, Belyaev decided to turn back the clock to the point at which animals received the first challenge of domestication. By replaying the process, he would be able to see how changes in behavior, physiology and morphology first came about. Of course, reproducing the ways and means of those ancient transformations, even in the roughest outlines, would be a formidable task. To keep things as clear and simple as possible, Belyaev designed a selective-breeding program to reproduce a single major factor, strong selection pressure for tamability. He chose as his experimental model a species taxonomically close to the dog but never before domesticated: Vulpes vulpes, the silver fox. Belyaev’s fox-breeding experiment occupied the last 26 years of his life. Today, 14 years after his death, it is still in progress.
Through genetic selection alone, our research group has created a population of tame foxes fundamentally different in temperament and behavior from their wild forebears. In the process we have observed some striking changes in physiology, morphology and behavior, which mirror the changes known in other domestic animals and bear out many of Belyaev’s ideas.
Of course, whilst in a wild setting, wolves (the ancestors of the modern domestic dog) and foxes may have been competitors for some food items, and the larger wolf may have used its size and social organisation to reduce that competition, those wolves would almost certainly have exerted the minimum effort required to achieve success in this vein, and the encounter would not, in the main, be expected to lead to a long, harrowing chase of the fox, followed by a savage mauling to death. Much more likely, the fox would have been given recognisable warning signals to back off by the wolves, and taken heed thereof, fleeing to seek an easier feeding opportunity, experiencing far less stress than would be the case during a fox hunt.
It's interesting to note that foxes are amenable to the same process of domestication that occurred approximately 15,000 years ago with sub-populations of wolves, and exhibit, as the paper above illustrates, similar transformations during the domestication process. Far from being "vermin" (though I notice in the Wikipedia page on the red fox, it was reclassified as a chase game animal as long ago as the reign of Cnut the Great, circa 1000 CE, and removed from the list of "Beasts of Venery", leading eventually to Edward I having a specialist pack of foxhounds in the 13th century), foxes are sufficiently akin to dogs (not merely from the phylogenetic standpoint, I add) to be domesticable animals. The vast difference in treatment thereof, particularly by chinless Hoorays poncing about the countryside, has no basis in scientific fact.
#198 by Rachel Bronwyn » May 24, 2015 8:37 pm
Onyx8 wrote:Didn't their coats change colour, and their tails went all curly as a side-effect of the tamability selection?
#199 by DaveScriv » May 24, 2015 8:51 pm
DarthHelmet86 wrote:You mean to say...I could have a damn tame fox? Why...why is this not a fucking thing?
#200 by Onyx8 » May 24, 2015 11:11 pm
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