- guardian.co.uk, Friday August 4 2006 13.01 BST
Exmoor Foxhounds huntsman Tony Wright was convicted of illegally hunting foxes on Exmoor, Devon, following a week-long hearing at Barnstaple magistrates court.
District Judge Paul Palmer fined him £500 and ordered him to pay £250 costs after a week-long hearing.
Wright, a 52-year-old of Exmoor Kennels, Simonsbath, had pleaded not guilty to the charge of hunting a fox on April 29 last year contrary to the Hunting Act 2004. The maximum penalty for convictions under the legislation is a £5,000 fine.
The private prosecution, brought by the League Against Cruel Sports, was the first in England against a fox or stag hunt under the Act.
"I understand the difficulty that everyone has with the Act coming into force," the judge told Wright. "What I saw was not exempt hunting."
Giving the reasons for his finding, the judge said he was of the view that Wright had been hunting with two dogs.
Wright had told the court that his dogs remained under close control during an outing on April 29 last year.
He said a marksman was ready to shoot fleeing foxes as soon as possible - conditions required for a legal hunt under the terms of the legislation, which became law in February 2005.
However, the prosecution successfully argued that Wright - who has been a hunt professional all his adult life - had been leading a "traditional hunt", pursuing foxes rather than flushing them out.
He told the court the hunt had flushed out five foxes, one of which was shot. The prosecution saw video evidence of the meet, gathered by League Against Cruel Sports officers Edmund Shepherd and Graham Floyd.
Judge Palmer said the video showed the hounds following the line of the fox at speed without immediately being called off, and there was a "substantial period" of chase for each of the two foxes seen on the footage.
Long after the foxes were flushed, they were being followed by the hounds - which, in the judge's view, was hunting.
He said no reasonable steps were taken to shoot the fox as soon as possible, and the dogs were not under close control as required by the legislation.
Since the ban on hunting with dogs in England and Wales came into force, hunts have continued and in some cases become even more popular, often using exemptions in the legislation.
The League Against Cruel Sports had claimed Wright had "cynically" used the exemptions to lead an event that "bore all the hallmarks of a traditional hunt".
However, Simon Hart, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, said: "No right minded person thinks that Tony Wright should have been branded a criminal.
"If people were confused about the Hunting Act before today, they will be a lot more confused now. We believe that he was trying to comply with the law as he understood it."
