“YOU can pull and drag out of a foxhound, but with harriers you just have to leave ‘em alone,” Jamie Crosse, then huntsman to the Stonehall Harriers, once told me. As a hunting correspondent, this is just the sort of succinct soundbite I like, but my editor at Horse and Hound was quick to contact me with the request, ‘Please explain “pulling and dragging”’.

Pulling and dragging aside, it is true that there are many different types of hound hunting the fox in Ireland, each with its own virtues, each with its avid supporters and scornful detractors.