Beagling: the connoisseur’s field sport?
“THEY keep running on with joy and spirit, investigating the trail through every turn, now in circles, now straightforward, now obliquely, through thick and thin, places known and unknown, passing each other by turns, moving their tails, throwing back their ears and their eyes darting fire.”
The above lines were written not by a contemporary enthusiast of the active, happy little beagle nor even by an Edwardian or Victorian commentator, but by Xenophon, the Athenian military leader, historian and philosopher in his Cynegeticus, a treatise on hunting, in around 400BC.
To me, a 21st-century beagler, there is a tremendous magic in the knowledge that our handling of hounds in the kennel and field would be familiar to huntsmen through the centuries, and so much that was relevant then remains so today. Hunting was once described to me as
