Elric Newby

Location: London

Affiliations: North London Hunt Sabs

Elric Newby is a painter and decorator by trade and, at weekends, a DJ at Metal Devastation and hunt saboteur with the North London Hunt Sabs. In other words, a man who has built his life around volume and disruption.

By his own account he has collected affiliations the way other people collect stamps: street outreach for Earthlings Experience, We The Free and We Stand For The Animals; Animal Save Movement vigils; organiser of the rebooted East London Chicken Save; a regular at Fur Free London and at the Welcome Centre Milk Exhibition campaign; volunteer work for Animal Justice Project, Freedom for Animals, Viva, PETA "and many independent grassroots campaigns". He has recently founded an Earthlings Experience chapter in Stratford.

Behind the Mask

Newby volunteered most of what BTM knows about his sabbing himself, on a recent episode of the North London Hunt Saboteurs podcast. Ironically, the episode was called ‘Behind the Mask’, a format in which each sab in the group introduces themselves, explains how they got into it, and describes their experiences so far.

BTM would like to place its thanks on record. It is not often that a subject does our work for us.

"Three Seasons, No Kills"

Newby not only unmasked himself on the podcast; he has also documented his sabbing activities, posting photographs on Facebook of himself out disrupting hunts.

He is now in his third season of sabbing and says he is "absolutely loving it". He is keen to stress that sabs "save animals 98, 99% of the time", and in three years he has never once witnessed a kill.

He offers this as testament to the movement's effectiveness. But there is another explanation, and it happens to be the correct one.

What Newby has spent three seasons following is legal trail hunting: hounds working a scent laid in advance. On that reading, his clean sheet is not a record of interventions heroically made. It is a record of a lawful activity being lawfully conducted, weekend after weekend, while it is filmed by a man who calls the absence of a crime a victory.

Newby has, in short, spent three years gathering evidence that there is nothing to see, and mistaken it for a scoreboard.

The New School

Sabbing, it turns out, has schools. Newby is associated with what he calls the ‘new one’, and the difference is a matter of aggression: the old school calls hounds out from the edge of a covert, the new school goes in after them.

His own example of the method is a "crazy sab" from Norfolk who went into the thick part of the wood. Asked to describe someone doing the job properly, the word Newby reaches for, unprompted, is ‘crazy’. They know exactly what they are.

 Metal Devastation

Devastation is the business Newby is in. He broadcasts it under that name, and at weekends he tries his hand at the real thing, applied to a rural tradition that Parliament legalised and the countryside has been getting on with quite happily long before the North London Hunt Sabs existed.

On his own evidence, the results are in. Three seasons, no kills witnessed, no crimes prevented. The only thing devastated by Newby's weekends, the peace of a Saturday morning.