Quick Red Foxes: Irish Women Write the Hunt

Abstract

Ecofeminist Carol J. Adams has argued that hierarchies of value among living creatures create the category of the subhuman: we normalize the brutalization and killing of animals and then make of the human Other an animal.¹ In this essay, I want to use Ireland as a case study for exploring the ways a particular animal, the red fox, appears in the cultural products of capitalist-driven colonialism and postcolonialism. Considered one of Ireland’s 21 indigenous mammals, the fox has for centuries been hunted for sport and for fur as well as raised on fur farms in Ireland. By examining a variety of texts, including Arthur Stringer’s eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish hunting manual, The Experienced Huntsman (1714) and Somerville and Ross’s nineteenth-century fox-hunting sketches in their Irish R.M. series (1899–1915), I hope to explore how the degrading of animals is coextensive with the degrading of human Others; indeed, we can see in these Anglo-Irish texts how the constructed proximity of the indigenous Irish to animals justified the colonial use of force to subdue and contain them. Conversely, making the ideological connections between the oppression of women, the Irish, and animals, prominent nineteenth-century animal advocates from Ireland like Richard Martin of Galway, worked for both human and animal liberatory practices. I find in twentieth-century Irish poems by Geraldine Mills and Paula Meehan representations of foxes that value both the fox and the female narrators as feral and undomesticated, providing a model for the ways true human(e)ness requires that the lives of animals be acknowledged as having intrinsic worth.