The Countryside Crusader Who Fishes for a Living
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
There is a particular breed of animal rights lover who wakes each morning convinced that the hills and hedgerows of Britain cannot turn on their axis without their personal supervision.
Derek Farr is one of them. Not out in the field, but from the comfort of a Facebook comment box, where he has appointed himself a one-man adjudicator on how trail hunts should conduct their perfectly legal activities.
When he is not online telling hunts what to do with their hounds, Farr runs Isle Adventures Limited, a charter operation running out of the Isle of Whithorn aboard the Lauren Jade. The company offers “wildlife and fishing trips,” a day out that includes fishing for over 20 species of fish, with tope, bass, and pollock as the headline draws.
Farr, in his own words, has “always been a shooter and angler.” At BTM, we are wholehearted advocates for every variety of legal country pursuits – shooting and fishing included.
But the comedy writes itself: a man who seeks to police the conduct of one legal country sport (condemning it as “criminal”) happily partakes, and profits from, others.
Pressed on the contradiction, Farr reaches for the only argument available to him: “angling is a legal activity.” Quite so. So is trail hunting. The Hunting Act does not prohibit hounds following a laid scent across country, which is precisely what modern hunts do. Farr’s defence of his own hobbies is, word for word, the defence he refuses to accept when it is offered by anyone in a red coat.
Legality, it seems, is a magnificent shield when held over a fishing rod and a curious irrelevance when held over a pack of hounds.
To be clear about what Farr is crusading against from his keyboard: a rag. Trail hunts lay a scent for hounds to follow using a soaked cloth, doused in scent, dragged across country in advance. The hounds are exercising their instincts on the scent of something that is crucially not there. Any foxes, for their part, are somewhere else entirely, almost certainly being rather less troubled by the morning than Farr is.
Farr has a phrase for people who engage with legal activities he happens to disapprove of. They are, he says, “active supporter[s] of criminal activities.”
His other rhetorical mode, when the evidence runs thin, is to demand that his opponents produce theirs while offering none himself, and, when that fails, to speculate darkly about what they might be “hiding” behind a locked profile.
“Puppy farming,” he offers, apropos of nothing, to a woman who has simply asked him to back up a claim.
This is the register of the countryside crusader in full flow: evidence-light, accusation-heavy, and entirely convinced that the moral high ground is wherever he happens to be typing from.
It makes you wonder how Farr squares any of it. The difference, from a wildlife perspective, between the country sports that Farr enjoys and trail hunting is that trail hunting doesn’t involve any wildlife at all.
Perhaps Farr has simply not put two and two together. The animal rights proclaimer is often so busy crusading that he forgets to audit his own ledger. He sees a trail hunt and sees cruelty, even where none exists. He sees a rod and a line and sees a pleasant day out, even as the hook goes in.
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