Disciplined Affections: The Making of an English Pack of Foxhounds

Abstract

This chapter explores the nature and structure of the relationships that allow the huntsman to shape the behaviours of scores of individual animals into a harmonious unity as a free-ranging but disciplined collectivity, the pack, such that they can perform their task of hunting foxes across the countryside. In the context of animal-keeping in England, foxhounds constitute an unusual group. The chapter touches on only some aspects of the practice of foxhunting. Foxhounds are owned by the registered foxhunt organizations that breed them. The distinction between foxhounds and other dogs is marked by the system of naming individual animals. The creation of a pack of foxhounds centers not simply on the production of animal bodies but on the production of a set of relationships , through trained bodies, that connect humans and hounds and, by implication, wild foxes. In order to maintain what are regarded as the essential and necessary qualities of a foxhound there should be no indulgence in sentimentality.

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