11 hours ago
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In 2024, a village in Hampshire woke up to something truly disturbing. A mound of dead animals had been dumped outside a school, and blood oozed out on to the streets before children’s classes started for the day. There were about 20 carcasses, including rabbits, hares, pheasants, a fox and a muntjac deer with its head severed. The village was dumbfounded, and the biggest question was: why?
The husband-and-wife investigative journalist team of Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor – the pair behind the award-winning BBC podcast series, and now forthcoming documentary, Buried – found themselves wondering the same thing. Their new 10-part podcast, Buried: Dead Rabbit, delves into this and finds them plunged into the shady world of illegal bloodsports. Specifically, hare coursing – where dogs hunt hares to kill them, an activity that has been banned in the UK since 2005 – and its links to organised crime and the dangerous, violent characters who are terrorising villages across the country.
They soon uncover more instances of mutilated animals. They discover lambs strung up in public with their throat cut and 50 dead animals deposited on the door of a farm shop with their blood smeared across the windows. There’s even talk of potential satanic activity, but the more likely connecting factor is that these were threats: intimidation tactics conducted by illegal hare hunters to instil fear in communities that they are operating in.
As part of the investigation, they team up with someone who knows plenty about intimidation: Chris Packham. The wildlife presenter, author and animal rights activist has been the target of numerous attacks, finding everything from dead animals to human excrement on his doorstep.
All three of them are sitting at the Crucible theatre in Sheffield after they have premiered the first episode at Sheffield DocFest. “I knew it was taking place but I wasn’t aware of the scale of it before this,” says Packham, who has been campaigning against hare coursing for years. In the podcast he describes what they uncover as “insidious and macabre … sickening”.
He is, however, aware of how far some people will go to shut down discerning pro-nature voices. In 2021, someone set fire to his car at his home. “Do I fear reprisals?” ponders Packham, when I ask him if he has any concerns about doing this podcast. “Well, they car-bombed my house – there’s not much more they can do. I’m always aggravated by injustice and if the truth needs to be told, then I need to be a conduit for that truth. I can’t entertain wilful blindness.” If anything, Packham seems to get a charge from pursuing the perpetrators. “I love the thrill of the chase. I should have been a hunter,” he jokes at one point in the series, while on a stakeout. “Hunting nefarious humans.”
The trio reveal a grizzly underworld run by criminals where elaborate and lucrative illegal hare coursing championships exist. They discover people betting on them on the dark web from China to the US, while the innocent farmers who own the fields where such events take place are targeted, threatened, attacked and terrorised. “Mafia-esque,” is how Taylor describes it on the podcast. It’s become such a widespread activity that they reveal there have been more than 8,500 incidents of illegal hare coursing reported to the police in the last three years. Some farmers are being targeted so relentlessly and violently that they have become suicidal. “They flagrantly don’t care,” says Packham of the hunters. “They’ve crossed that line where there is absolutely no regard for the law.”
What happens is groups of Balaclava-clad men in convoys of four-by-four vehicles target farms, breaking in and brazenly taking over their land. Police have often been deathly slow to respond or disinterested so small, usually rural and isolated, communities are left in fear. The dead animals are just the tip of the iceberg. Those who have challenged the hunters have ended up in hospital in a coma with broken legs and collapsed lungs, received rape threats, had bricks thrown through their windows threats of violence to children and their dogs kidnapped and skinned.
It’s big money too. Top dogs in the sport – those who can kill the most – are being sold for £50,000 and there’s even a mega competition with its own trophy called the Super 8 cup. “We thought it was a load of rubbish,” says Ashby, of the cup. “I thought the criminals were hyping it up, so I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It was this massive cup with these beautiful ornate dogs carved on it. It just struck me that, wow, this is a very organised competition in the underworld.”
For Taylor, it’s an ugly symbol of just how shameless this activity is becoming. “It’s an emblem of the audacity of all of this,” she says. “This isn’t something that’s hidden away in street corners. They’re out there and they’re proud – they don’t care.” Part of the investigation unveils the shifting demographic of the hunters too, as younger people from different backgrounds are getting involved, with flexing on social media becoming common. “People have this image of hare coursing as being quite quaint, this really old-fashioned country pursuit,” says Taylor. “But it’s getting much more associated with serious organised crime and violent people. It is a shift into something really dark and dangerous.”
The podcast shows just how far it’s spreading too, with damage to land and businesses being reported from Essex to North Yorkshire. “Organised crime is perceived as a very urban thing,” says Packham. “This is a revelation that it’s taking place in the countryside.” It’s so ingrained in some areas that there are concerns about how deep it truly goes. “One police and crime commissioner told us that he fears they’re now inside the police,” Ashby says. “And that he’s noticed that a lot of their big operations against them seem to mysteriously never quite work. He said he thinks that the police should be looking much closer at the inside. It’s Line of Duty-esque.”
For Ashby, the series isn’t just about hare coursing itself but what it symbolises about where we’re at societally. “It’s the story of the growth of organised crime in the UK and our relationship with nature,” he says. “We have a sense of British exceptionalism that something like the ivory trade is terrible and would never happen on these shores. But these are wide open spaces where there’s commercialisation of nature for a horrible means, which is ignored by society. It’s our job to remind people that these are incredibly urgent issues.”
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Buried: Dead Rabbit is on BBC Sounds now.
