Chris Packham ‘Packs-It-In’ after BBC Axes Winterwatch. We Ask Why

The BBC has confirmed that Winterwatch will not return after 14 years, retired in favour of a video podcast called Naturewatch. The corporation attributes the decision to an "evolving commissioning strategy" and to the wider funding squeeze that has already claimed 550 jobs as part of a £500 million savings drive. It is a tidy explanation, and it may even be the true one, but the axe happened to fall on Chris Packham's programme only weeks after Packham, one of the country's loudest opponents of trail hunting, was photographed at Westminster handling a foxhound that a Somerset huntsman says was stolen from him.

Whatever the reason for the decision, Packham is hardly a figure the BBC will relish being seen to defend at the moment. Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, said “the cancellation gave the corporation a chance to rebalance its rural programming”, pointing to concerns that have dogged the show for years.

In one example, a badger was filmed swimming out to an island and devouring 19 eggs from the nests of endangered birds. Packham described the incident as the behaviour of “a rogue badger” rather than explaining it as normal predatory behaviour. It is precisely the kind of rhetoric that invites accusations of bias, something a BBC presenter is expected to avoid.

The hound pictured with Packham is the face of Protect the Wild's Rehome The Hounds campaign, which argues that these pack animals can be adopted by individuals, and invites readers to believe all 12,000 hounds in Britain's registered hunting packs could be found homes.

The Telegraph has since put a name to the animal. She is Canvas, a six-year-old foxhound bred by Jack Harris, huntsman of the Taunton Vale in Somerset, from which she was allegedly taken in February before being passed to saboteurs. Harris recognised her at once, not least from her missing front left toe, which is plainly visible in the rally photographs.

Packham denied knowing the hound’s origin and defended the cause, saying he would rather be one of his poodles than a nameless pack hound fed on fallen livestock. The remark highlights a contradiction at the heart of the campaign: if Rehome The Hounds gives every other dog on its website a name and story, why is its most visible mascot the one animal it will not account for?

This is not the first time Packham's activism has strayed into territory the BBC might reasonably find awkward. In December 2024, he and his stepdaughter Megan McCubbin joined the Northants Hunt Sabs to disrupt a meeting of the Cottesmore Hunt in Leicestershire, an outing Packham livestreamed to his account on X (formerly Twitter) in a broadcast beset by technical difficulties.

The livestream featured Mel Broughton, a longtime figure in the Northants Sabs, who in 2010 was convicted of conspiracy to commit arson and sentenced to ten years. The charges related to home-made incendiary devices placed at two Oxford colleges, one of which ignited on the roof of a cricket pavilion at Queen's College and caused around £14,000 of damage, though no one was hurt. Broughton was, at various points in his campaigning career, associated with the Animal Liberation Front, a movement the FBI identified as a “serious domestic terrorist” threat in 2004.

During the livestream Packham and McCubbin discussed alleged violence against saboteurs with Broughton, a striking choice of subject given the record of assaults running in the other direction. Paul Allman was sentenced in August 2023 to 20 weeks for a violent attack on two members of the Wynnstay Hunt at Cuddington, and in November 2024 Mark Fothergill of the East Yorkshire Coast Hunt Sabs was arrested over an alleged assault on a member of the Derwent Hunt.

On the same broadcast Packham repeated the claim, propagated by groups such as Protect the Wild, that trail hunting is a smokescreen for the illegal killing of foxes. Anyone who has attended a trail hunt will recognise that this is a complete falsehood.

‘Impartiality’ is expected of all presenters, but Packham is clearly an exception.  According to the British Hound Sports Association, since the Hunting Act came into force in 2005 there have been 23 criminal convictions for hunts illegally killing foxes across more than 228,000 trail hunting days, which is to say that the rules are followed on 99.99 per cent of occasions.

Packham is a freelance, but the distinction offers less cover than it might appear. The BBC's social media guidance states that everyone who works for the corporation should ensure their activity does not compromise the perception of, or undermine, the BBC's impartiality and reputation, or their own. Those in a position such as Packham's carry a particular responsibility to uphold that impartiality through their conduct online.

Nor is a pattern hard to discern once you look for it. In December 2023 Packham was removed as patron of the charity Raptor Rescue. The chairman, Malcolm Robbins, told The Telegraph that the presenter had done nothing for the charity, could not be contacted, and had grown increasingly political in a way that unsettled the membership.

Last week offered another reminder of Packham’s lack of impartiality when he appeared on Celebrity Gogglebox alongside McCubbin. Watching Clarkson’s Farm, he claimed “most farms are horrible monocultures” where animals are “kept in the dark”, before accusing Clarkson of presenting an “idealistic” version of farming. The irony appears to have been lost on Packham: his own sweeping claims risk giving viewers the very distorted impression he accused Clarkson of creating.

If this was a demotion, it was a strange one. In the same breath as Winterwatch was retired, the BBC confirmed Packham would front Evolution, a five-part series beginning on BBC Two next week. A curious reward for a presenter whose impartiality keeps making the papers.

None of this proves that Winterwatch fell to anything other than the accountant's pen. The BBC's financial pressures are real and well documented. Not to mention the 10 billion dollars’ worth of impartiality issues already on their desk from across the pond. But a presenter whose off-air conduct has cost him one patronage, drawn repeated criticism over impartiality, and placed him in the frame of a stolen-dog controversy is not an obvious asset to a corporation counting every controversy. Whether that entered the calculation is a question only the BBC can answer.