FOX HUNTING. 1 17 



against any unfair treatment of the fox, by bag 

 hunting, digging out when he had been run to 

 earth, and the destroying of their harbors, has 

 been instilled into the present membership, and 

 such unsportsmanlike practices are not indulged in 

 or countenanced by this club. 



The serious opposition to bag hunting is that 

 it encourag^es the digging out of foxes; and if the 

 fox is not killed in the bag run, he is so scared by 

 his capture and confinement, that he quits the part 

 of the country he has been living in, and where 

 he has given sport to hunters. This is the reason 

 fox hunters seldom dig out foxes on their own 

 grounds or runs; and those who do dig them out, 

 as a rule, do the digging on the grounds of other 

 hunters, and this has always been considered a 

 mean act and not honorable. Then another ob- 

 jection is, that a captured fox which has been con- 

 fined for a week, ten days, two weeks, or more, as 

 is generally the case, in a damp cellar or in a 

 close room on a board floor, is not in fair run- 

 ning condition to be thrown down before a pack 

 of hounds for a run; and the fifteen, or twenty, or 

 more minutes given him as a start is of little ad- 

 vantage to the fox, merely giving him time to 

 shake himself together or to fill himself with 

 water at a running stream, a disadvantage to him, 

 and if in a strange country he certainly cannot de- 



