BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
There is a photograph circulating, and it shocks. A masked ‘man’ in a balaclava, hood up, stares at a child on a pony. The child is small, seven perhaps younger, dressed in the tan coat and velvet helmet of a hunting child. The man’s eyes are fixed on him. The expression, whichever benefit of the doubt is given, is hatred.
Assume the photograph is not doctored. Assume the man despises the child. The question that follows is not a rhetorical one: when, if ever, does that hatred become right?
The honest answer is that it never does. And the reason is not sentimentality about children. It is that hatred of a child is always a category error. The child on the pony did not choose hunting as a moral position. He did not draft the legislation, organise the meets, or decide the ethics of the chase. He was dressed by adults and placed on an animal by adults, and he is there because it is Saturday morning and his family trail hunts. What the masked man is reacting to is not a person but a costume, and behind the costume, a family he has never met. To hate a child for the opinions of his parents is to abandon the distinction between argument and tribe. It is the same error as hating a child for his father’s religion, his mother’s politics, or the colour of his skin. We have a word for that, and it is not ‘activism’.
And let us be plainer than the photograph’s defenders would like. Any adult who hates a child for ideological reasons has a screw loose. That is not a debating point; it is a description of a disordered mind. A grown man who directs genuine hatred at a seven-year-old because of what the child’s family does on a Saturday is not a political actor but someone whose moral compass has come loose from its moorings, and he should seek help. If the hatred is political, if he has convinced himself the child is an enemy in some larger struggle, then the matter is graver still, and he should hand himself in to Prevent. That is what the mechanism is for: not for people with uncomfortable opinions, but for people whose fixations have curdled into something that fixes on children as targets. A man who cannot look at a boy on a pony without seeing an adversary is precisely the kind of person the safeguarding apparatus exists to catch before the fixation hardens into something worse.
This is where the Middle East parallel, which some reach for, collapses. It is tempting to say: look, people hate children across sectarian lines everywhere, so why not here? But the comparison insults both situations. In genuinely sectarian conflicts, children are hated as members of a group in a war of survival, in conditions of occupation, dispossession, and real violence, conditions no British hunt saboteur inhabits. To borrow that language for a dispute over trail hunting in the English shires is not to illuminate; it is to inflate. A man who glares at a child on a pony is not a soldier and the child is not an enemy. He is a protester, and the child is a bystander. The moment a protester cannot tell the difference, the protest has stopped being about the hunt, and the protester has stopped being someone whose judgment can be trusted.
None of this means hunt saboteurs are all villains and all hunts are saints. Direct action against hunting is still lawful when it is lawful, and people have every right to loathe blood sports with real moral seriousness should they so wish. You can believe hunting is cruelty dressed as tradition, many do, and still hold the line that the child in the tan coat is not your opponent.
Perhaps the League Against Cruel Sports (better known as the League for Cruel Sports) should take a leaf out of Sinn Féin’s book and report its terrorists and child-haters to the police, before the fixation finds a target it can justify to itself.
Dominic Wightman is in his tenth year as Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Dear Townies and Conservatism (2024).