Fox Hunting at Core of Protest

LONDON — A quarter-million people poured into London on Sunday to protest a government they say threatens their rural way of life.

From the grouse moors of Scotland and the green valleys of Wales and England, landowners and laborers, fox hunters and their opponents brought their diverse grievances to the capital in Britain’s largest single demonstration since antinuclear marches in the early 1980s.

The crowd, which Scotland Yard estimated at 250,000, marched two miles from the Thames-side Victoria Embankment through Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park.

Fox hunting was at the heart of the matter.

A Labor legislator has initiated a bill to ban hunting with hounds, provoking anger among thousands of men and women who gallop on horseback across frozen farmland on winter days in pursuit of the fox.

Hunting opponents say it is barbaric to allow dogs to tear a fox to death and that no civilized society can tolerate it.

Hunters say they provide a vital control of foxes, which are a farmyard pest, and that people who have no knowledge or understanding of the hunt have no right to deny them their sport.