One sentence in the recent Daily Telegraph obituary on Charles Parker, the former terrierman with the Heythrop Hunt, will probably have surprised some readers. I quote: “Parker’s earth-stopping and [hunt master Ronnie] Wallace’s methods of preserving fox habitats ensured a remarkably large and healthy fox population.”

The surprise will have been felt by anyone naive enough to suppose that foxhunting had anything to do with the eradication of a dangerous pest.

That it had was the big lie — perhaps the biggest lie — told about the ‘sport’ by those who practised it.

Don’t take it from me. Here is how the matter was put by Anthony Trollope, himself a devoted hunter, in his novel Phineas Redux (1874). Again I quote: “There is something doubtless absurd in the intensity of the worship paid to the fox by hunting communities. The animal becomes sacred and his preservation is a religion. His irregular destruction is a profanity, and words spoken to his injury are blasphemous.”