By Derek Fanning
The ancient and proud history of hunting with hounds
T
he practice of hunting wild mammals with dogs has been with us in Ireland for an incredibly long time. No one has an idea exactly how old the practice is but it could be several thousand years old. It's almost certain that our prehistoric ancestors engaged in the activity. Therefore when you head out in the fields and woods to hunt foxes or hares you are part of an extremely ancient tradition. Some people are under the mistaken illusion that hunting with dogs is a tradition introduced by the British a few centuries ago. The activity is much older and it's completely wrong to associate it with the British because it in fact transcends national identity. Hunting is an instinct innate in each of us regardless of our race, nationality, gender or creed. The famous zoologist Desmond Morris points out that for about a million years our ancestors roamed the Earth, in small groups, hunting and gathering. You cannot erase a million years of hunting by wishful thinking or fashionable ideology, because it's hardwired into our psyches and, according to Morris, is connected to our feelings of happiness. The moments in
our lives when we achieve something hard-won and punch the air in triumph is related, he says, to the moment when our ancestors caught and killed their prey. Our hunter-gatherer forebears spent much of their time and energy engaged in the chase. Thankfully we no longer have to devote so much time and energy to the pursuit of food but the instinct is still very powerful in us. We of course do not know when these hunter-gatherers started using dogs to assist them in their hunting. It's estimated that it could be about 20,000
In Ancient Greece hounds were used not to catch the hare, but to drive it towards nets and a hidden huntsman, a practice which was perhaps familiar to the ancient Celts. This illustration appears on a phial in the British Museum.
years ago. Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago and with the passage of time hunting increasingly became a sport rather than a matter of survival. Cave paintings which are 6,000 years old show pointers, shepherds, mastiffs, greyhounds, and wolf breeds. At the turn of the 20th Century, Lady Gregory went through a lot of manuscripts featuring Irish myths and married them expertly in her excellent book "Gods and Fighting Men". In this book Fionn Mac Cumhail and the Fianna engage in an awful lot of hunting and there are many references to hunting with hounds. The Fianna are lovers of music and poetry as well as the chase (for example, there is reference to a woman harper called Fethnaid who is one of the Tuatha de Danaan and plays music which is "the delight of their minds".) The manuscripts which Lady Gregory used date back to the 9th Century, which shows that hunting with hounds was a very popular activity in Ireland as far back as this at least. Many people think the Fianna (or their equivalent) hunted with wolfhounds. In fact this is not so. Archaeologists have found no dogs of Irish Wolfhound size at Irish sites from
Irish Country Sports and Country Life Spring/Summer 2021
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