It was the week the men and women in riding breeches and hunting pink came to town. But the countryside rally in Hyde Park this June didn’t feel like a gathering of the Belvoir or the Quorn. It felt more like Gay Pride. For someone who has spent more time on marches than riding to hounds, there was a sense of familiarity in the crowd at last week’s rally. It was the spectacle of a minority feeling strength in numbers. The roars of approval that greeted each speaker were those of people hearing sentiments close to their hearts spoken aloud, broadcast to the metropolis for the first time. The air of defiance, the display of solidarity, the proclaimed determination to fight back against real or perceived oppression – all staples of identity politics, of a constituency discovering its strength.

And communal singing. There was a lot of that. The hunt-supporters sang along to ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ and ‘The Music of the Hounds’, rather than gay anthems such as ‘I Will Survive’ or ‘We Are Family’, but the familiar ecstatic buzz was there, the high of communal hyperventilation. Plus the tight-fitting clothes and leather gear that both constituencies share a taste for.

The Labour peer Anne Mallalieu told the cheering crowd in Hyde Park, ‘hunting is our art, our pleasure, our poetry, our way of life’. It’s a phrase that could be applied to a number of urban and rural minority pursuits: ballroom dancing, say, or pigeon-fancying, or bell-ringing, or party politics, all of which give multiple common satisfactions to their practitioners. But in the case of hunting folk, it’s sexual minorities that offer the clearest parallel.

Compare the fierce indignation of hunt supporters and the moralistic disapproval they face from their opponents with gay activism and anti-gay prejudice. Fox-hunters and gay people both proclaim the right to enjoy a range of sensual pleasures that most other people do not wish to partake of and sometimes disapprove of strongly. Same-sex sex and ritualized violence towards animals are both, moreover, human universals, found in more or less all places and all times. And although fox-hunting lacks the transparent sexual symbolism of its sister pursuit, cock-fighting, there’s a palpable aura of heightened sensuality in the hunting milieu – as there is in a gay bar.

Let Vegans speak

Of course, from the point of view of opponents of the hunt, it is outrageous to compare the pleasure that hunters take in the death of an animal (or that their opponents say they take) with consensual sex between adult human beings, even with the ludic violence of bondage and sado-masochism. Anti-hunt campaigners are likely to reject the comparison with gay activism just as strongly as hunt supporters are. If there is any parallel between hunting and sex, the anti-hunt lobby might argue, it is with sex acts that are universally condemned, such as rape or necrophilia.

It’s certainly true that it’s animal rights campaigners – as part of a broad liberal coalition – and not supporters of the hunt who have historically been sympathetic to the cause of sexual minorities. (Lord Arran, for instance, the sponsor of the 1967 homosexual law reform bill, also campaigned against badger-baiting, remarking that his life’s work had been to ‘stop people buggering badgers and badgering buggers’.)

To condemn hunting, however, is hypocritical, unless you actually eat no eggs or meat or fish, drink no milk and wear no leather or wool. That is to say unless you avoid participation completely in the exploitation of animals – the ancient, ruthless practice on which human livelihood has been based since time immemorial. Even as we express tender-hearted sentiments towards our fellow-creatures, most of us – gay or straight, fox-hunters or not – are implicated in the hidden cruelties of factory farming and the destruction of the wild – in the obliteration of the habitat that sustains the very animals we sentimentalise. Fox-hunting, by contrast, can be seen as a visible and unapologetic celebration of this exploitation of nature, the process in which we are all complicit. It may be argued that only those who remove themselves from the cycle of exploitation of the animal world have a claim to ethical consistency.

So let the Vegans speak. For the rest of us, we are sinners and must recognise each other’s appetites and vices, whether we ride to hounds, run with wolves or feast with panthers.

These days, the followers of the hunt, who are accustomed to lording it over what remains of the countryside, find themselves the object of contumely and discrimination. Should they choose to reinvent themselves as an oppressed minority, it could be all to the good: it might give them an insight into the similar travails of other minorities, particularly those, such as sexual minorities, with which they are not traditionally identified. The followers of the hunt have learned the skills of political mobilisation; they may yet learn that the price of pleasure is mutual tolerance. Indeed, now that fox-hunters are familiar with the organisation of urban rallies, perhaps we can look forward to welcoming a fraternal delegation from the Countryside Alliance at next year’s Gay Pride. ★