Hit Report: Hunt Saboteurs Ireland - Scarteen “Black and Tans” hunt. Caherconlish 09/11/2019

Another opening Saturday meet sabbed. 14 saboteurs involved this time, our biggest group to date.

We started the day in two groups, Munster Hunt Sabs travelling from the South whilst Connacht Hunt Saboteurs travelling down from the West for the first joint meet of both groups. As always, our main objective was to find and obstruct the hounds from being forced to murder foxes.

Upon entering Caherconlish we immediately found some horse boxes which we followed to a nearby graveyard where there were about 10+ boxes in total. We felt this was quite a low number for a self proclaimed “large hunt” so we scouted the area in search of more. When we returned back to the graveyard the horses had been unboxed and there was no sign of the hunt.

From here we asked some local, entered a nearby field to gain a vantage point and continued circling the area to locate the hunt.

We found about 20 supporters looking into a nearby field, without any sign of the hunt. Perhaps they were watching the stars? (although it was only 1pm). Some altercations ensued, the landowner and his friends surrounding a couple of sabs at one stage. After about an hour we finally spotted the illusive hunt on a nearby mountain. We immediately parked up and headed promptly in their direction.

At the top of the hill we found the huntsman gathering the dogs. We deployed the gizmo to test its efficiency on a hunt never before sabbed. It worked extremely well creating confusion in the pack immediately. There was a bit of a standoff for about 20 minutes as the hunt seemed very afraid of folks looking at them whilst petting the pooches. The landowner arrived informing us we were trespassing but seemed not to know their own boundaries, so we presumed they meant they owned the entire county of Limerick. After a long wait for the huntsman to finally gather the hounds they headed off back down the road and packed up.

En route back to the car some hunt supporters drove a little stupidly towards us, perhaps forgetting we were recording everything. We were informed by the landowner that no kills were made on the day. We estimated due to lack of horseboxes and not many riders in the field that there were about 30 riders out, a lot less than was expected. Perhaps Scarteens days are numbered...

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