No Discrimination Against… Fox Hunters?

By Fiona Ong - Shawe Rosenthal LLP

September 6, 2024

As an employment attorney, I am, of course, deeply interested in which personal characteristics are protected from discrimination under law, and it is fascinating to see which new characteristics are deemed to warrant such protections. In recent years, CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Acts have seen success in many states. This past year, Maryland and New Mexico added military status to their respective lists of protected characteristics. But a recent attempt to expand discrimination protections in Britain certainly caught my attention – fox hunters??!!

As recently reported in the New York Times, a lobbying group is seeking to have pro-hunting classified as a “protected belief” under Britain’s anti-discrimination law. Some background may be helpful here. Britain banned fox hunting 20 years ago, although other forms of hunting (e.g. deer, rabbits, duck) are still permitted during hunting seasons with a license. But hunting those other animals is just not the same, apparently. So there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and those die-hard fox hunters came up with an alternative: trail hunting – where a trail of (usually fox) urine is deliberately laid for hunting dogs and their humans on horseback to follow. Often through fox territory – and (more than) occasionally, well, oops, the dogs catch and kill an actual fox. So the new Labour government has trail hunting in its sights – and the ersatz fox hunters are, shall we say, miffed.

So the head of a lobbying group that seeks to protect hunting with dogs is taking a shot at anti-discrimination lawsuits with the aim of eventually overturning the ban. Noting that the law has been found to protect a moral opposition to hunting, he argues that it’s the flip side – as quoted in the NY Times, “If he’s ‘anti-hunt,’ well, you can be ‘hunt,’ …. It’s just the same law.”

But really? Britain’s Equality Act prohibits discrimination based on a religious or philosophical belief. And the standard for what constitutes a philosophical belief is high – among other things, it must “be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available; be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour; attain a certain level of cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance; and be worthy of respect in a democratic society, compatible with human dignity and not conflict with the fundamental rights of others.”

So what would that belief system be? According to a university law professor quoted in the NY Times, “If hunting can be shown to be more than a recreational activity, perhaps as part of a belief system in human supremacy over animals or human dominion over the earth, then a protected belief system could work.” Well, it will be interesting to see if the lobbying group can target a philosophy of fox hunting that captures that concept in a logical way.

(Apparently, the lobby group head also thought about arguing that fox-hunters are a protected minority ethnic group – but that got shot down pretty quickly.)

But really, a privileged, predominantly white, upper-class group seeking to use an anti-discrimination law to protect their own social interests just strikes me as a blind for incredible elitism. In American slang, “that dog won’t hunt.”

www.shawe.com