Sporting and Dramatic REVIEW AND Licensed Victuallers' Gazette. With which is incorporated the Weekly Standard Thursday, January 12, 1905. THE GROWTH OF HUNTING.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XIII, Issue 775, 12 January 1905, Page 6

Sporting and Dramatic REVIEW AND Licensed Victuallers' Gazette. With which is incorporated the Weekly Standard Thursday, January 12, 1905. THE GROWTH OF HUNTING.

i From the very earliest times the love of , hunting in some shape or form has been j one of man’s chief characteristics, but no ! nation has ever gone in so enthusiastically i for it as the British In I ngland, and j Ireland especially, there is an intense ! love for the sport as we know it to-day, and there are innumerable packs

statioiel all ever these tuo countries, which are huuted ou nearly every day of the week during the season. Foreigners have not taken to the sport with such avidity, but there are strong indications that this will not much longer prove the case For instance, Captain Fred Cotton, well known in hunting circles down Christchurch way, has taken out a pack of hounds from England for the pursuit of wild foxes that abound in the Abrantcs district of Portugal. Few men have had the rare experience of horse and hound in all conditions and climes that • aptain Cotton has He has mastered fox-hounds in Virginia, the Christchurch pack in New Zealand, the Dove Valley and the Berks and Bucks Huiriers in England while for a short period he hunted th Westmeath foxhounds in Ireland. If the is to make h» ad way in King Carlos’ dominion it will certainly have a good chance now with such an enthusiastic nimrod to give it a start.

Something both pleasing and flattering is to be found in the way in which our national sport has •• caught on,” and flourished in so many parts of the world Few could have foreseen (says the “ Daily Mail ”) the extraordinary popularity now enjoyed by the Boman Fox-hounds when the late Lord Chester field, struck with the sporting possibilities of the country around the Eternal City, imported his pack of fox-hounds from England in 1842, and for the first time made the grand old Campagna ring with the stirring melody of hound and horn. No pack in England has a larger or more cosmopolitan following than the Roman fox hounds.

At Budapest hunting has always bejen popular since the great vogue given to it by the late Empress of Austria, so well known a figure in some of the best gr-iss countries in England and Ireland. At lau the excellent sport that is to be obtained attracts many English and American visitors, as well as several of the smart Paris set each winter; a pack of foxhounds has been maintained at Biarritz for many years, and it would be difficult to imagine how our officers sta ioned at Gibraltar would get along without their Calpe Fox-hounds—the only pack, by-the-bye, which is kennelled on British soil yet hunts on foreign land. Even more remarkable than the popularity that hunting enjoys on the Continent, however, is the gradual growth of the sport in India, Australia. Canada, South Africa, and almost every inhabitable part of the globe where Englishmen have settled. Thanks to Mr George Watson (a brother of Mr Bobert Watson who has been well named as “ Ireland’s greatest M.F.H.”), foxes weie imported into the country round Melbourne forty years ago, and fox-hunting there to-day probably bears a closer resemblance to our sport at home than anywhere else in the colonies But wherever it is, whether it is hunting jackal in India, kangaroo in Tasmania, the stout-running hare of New Zealand, blesbok over the rolling veldt of the Transvaal, or coyote on the boundless prairie of the great NorthWest, (here you will find the same keen love of the sport and its broadening, healthful, exhilarating influence.