ABSTRACT

This chapter will outline the origins of the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA), review its tactics and organisation, explore the social make-up of its membership and assess the contribution it made to changing the public’s attitude towards blood sports. The history of the HSA has to date been recorded either by those who were active saboteurs from the 1960s or by journalists.1 Richard Thomas also assessed the HSA’s impact as a pressure group in The Politics of Hunting (1983). An up-todate academic history that locates the HSA in the context of its time has yet to be written. The tactic of sabotaging hunts attracted a great deal of public attention and was a highly controversial development in the growth of opposition to blood sports from the late 1950s, yet it has been largely ignored in the growing literature on Britain’s post-war social history, with more attention focused on other forms of social protest, such as youth culture and nuclear disarmament.