Veterinary Association for Wildlife Management

Veterinary Association for Wildlife Management

Former Name: Vets for Hunting
Funded By: Unknown

Formed in 1999, Vets for Hunting is closely associated with the Countryside Alliance’s Middle Way Group. It was created by Dr Lewis Thomas who explained:

“Thus knowing little or nothing about hunting and certainly never having ridden to hounds it seemed to me there was an urgent need for some veterinary commonsense to be injected into the (hunting) debate. Also around that time there was the outrageous incident of Copper the Fox in which a wretched animal was snatched by saboteurs and subjected to the most appalling trauma and stress in the ensuing days. It was this incident that introduced me to Professor Twink Allen via the letters column of our professional journal the Veterinary Record. He, with others, had written protesting at the involvement of one of our profession in this incident and I wrote to him suggesting we form a veterinary group to inform the hunting debate. And thus after a very good lunch with some 40 like minded colleagues at Twink’s HQ in Newmarket, and a generous quantity of gin and tonic, Vets for Hunting, was born.” Country Illustrated, November 2005

So “knowing little or nothing about hunting”, Dr Thomas formed “Vets for Hunting”. The article goes onto says that his son became Kennel Huntsman for the Vine and Craven Hunt in 2005. Just when he started hunting is omitted.

Being rather upset that the Burns Inquiry didn’t take much notice of their “evidence”, they changed their name to the misleading Veterinary Association for Wildlife Management (YAWM). They still churn out the same discredited arguments, dreamed up with generous quantity of gin and tonic.