It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Former hunt saboteur Chris Atkins was so angry about the media coverage of the fox attack on the nine-month-old twins in Hackney he decided to make a hoax video depicting a group of urban fox hunters beating a fox to death in an alleyway with baseball bats. "We wanted to create something that would be so ridiculous that in any other area it would be immediately dismissed as a spoof, but that news outlets desperate to continue the media narrative against foxes would leap on without any thought as to its authenticity," says Atkins.
But if the targets of Atkins' satire were supposed to be over-zealous reporters, the stunt backfired spectacularly. Within hours of the video being posted on YouTube and Facebook, Atkins and his collaborator, Johnny Howorth, started receiving death threats. According to a report in yesterday's Guardian: "Animal rights campaigners had expressed fury over the 'bloodthirsty' huntsmen, eliciting the support of MPs on Twitter and prompting an inquiry by the Metropolitan police's wildlife crime unit." (To read more, click here.)
