A New Presidency for Packham: Putting the Cruel in the League
Chris Packham may have just become the President of The League Against Cruel Sports (LACS), but when it comes to disruptive and sanctimonious wildlife personalities, he has always been in a league of his own. A fitting appointment, given his longstanding opposition to trail hunting.
In a statement published on 13 October, chief executive Emma Slawinski called Packham “a perfect match” for the charity. Packham described himself as a “lifelong supporter” of the League. He even praised the charity for “working from a strong evidence base.”
It is a curious endorsement from a man whose own relationship with evidence has been firmly called into question. In 2024, part of Packham’s libel action against Country Squire magazine was thrown out by the High Court, leaving him ordered to pay £196,008 to proofreader Paul Read. In 2017, he apologised after suggesting, without evidence, that game shooting was behind a fall in lapwing numbers. We would hate for him to bring this amateurish approach to fact finding to such an upstanding organisation as LACS.
Then there is his conduct. During February’s “Operation Smokescreen” livestream, Packham branded those out trail hunting “entitled lunatics” and “psychopaths”. BTM questioned his apparently chance meeting with a couple who blamed a dead fox in their garden on a hunt meet held more than 18 miles away. In 2024, he told an audience that anyone banking with Barclays should “stick your head in a bucket of fuel and set fire to it.” The year before, he was dropped as patron of Raptor Rescue for becoming “too political”. The presidency of any organisation demands a measured temperament, and that is something Packham has shown little sign of possessing.
He has also attracted criticism for the company he keeps. During a December 2024 livestream at the Cottesmore Hunt, Packham was accompanied by Mel Broughton, who served a prison sentence following his 2010 conviction for conspiracy to commit arson. The association raises questions about the judgement exercised by a prominent public campaigner.
Nor is this the first time Packham has been at the centre of a campaign stunt. At a Protect the Wild rally outside Parliament in May, he and his stepdaughter Megan McCubbin posed with a foxhound that The Telegraph has since reported was allegedly taken from the Taunton Vale hunt in February. Huntsman Jack Harris said he instantly recognised the hound. But taking a hound away from the pack and the family that raised her is its own kind of cruelty. Packham brushed that aside, saying he would rather be one of his own poodles than “a nameless hound in a pack being fed on fallen livestock.” For the new President of the League Against Cruel Sports, it was a reply that put the “cruel” firmly in the title.
In Chris Packham, The League has chosen a figurehead who seems tailor-made for its campaign to outlaw trail hunting: outspoken, quick to condemn, and seemingly dismissive of the evidence and of the rural communities whose livelihoods depend on this lawful countryside activity.
