This love between man and dog is the heart of fox-hunting, and one of the reasons that hunting with hounds has been so often on the tip of the poet's tongue, and so often exalted in paint or marble or music. It is a refreshing love, based in realistic perceptions and mutual utility, and culminating in a common triumph. The love that people feel for their pets may be real, but it is seldom realistic. It rarely occurs to the suburban dog-lover that the ease with which his pet's affection is purchased is a sign of its moral worthlessness. Fido's wagging tail is misread as an endorsement, a sign that Fido has peered into his provider's heart and been moved by the spectacle of human kindness. The daily bowl of gravy-smeared chunks is a reward for moral insight. As for the creatures whose remnants lie in the bowl, the dog-lover has no qualms about their slaughter, so long as he does not witness it. For is it not obvious that they died to feed a moral being, a creature like you or me, whose wisdom, rationality and goodness of heart are all definitively proven by his choice of master?

No such sentiments pollute the heart of the huntsman. His hounds still live in their savage state, relieved of that constant and inachievable demand to mimic the manners of a moral being, which troubles the life of an incarcerated pet. They sleep in a pack in dog-scented kennels, hunt in a pack with their powers supremely stretched; they eat raw flesh, and not too much of it; they drink the brackish water of mud-stopped ditches; and the price of every slackness is the rough end of the tongue. Once trained to hunt they can never be subdued to a household regime, and can expect nothing when their hunting strength is gone besides a shot in the head, often administered by the very man whose love is all to them. But their time on earth is a happy one; everything they do is rooted in their nature, and even the crowning gift of human love comes in the guise of species-life: for the huntsman is leader of the pack, first among the band of canine warriors. His authority is not that mysterious, guilt-ridden thing that appears to the pet in the down-turned milky eyes of his crooning captor, but the glad imperative of the species, miraculously incarnate in human form.

—Roger Scruton, On Hunting