LONDON (AFP) - The government faced looming battles with supporters of fox hunting in both the courts and the countryside after ramming through a law banning the centuries-old blood sport.
The Labour-led House of Commons invoked special powers late Thursday to ban the country sport in England and Wales from February 18 next year, overriding furious objections from the House of Lords.
A last-minute compromise gesture by the government to postpone the ban until 2006, aimed at putting off the thorny issue until after next year's expected election, was rejected on Thursday by the House of Lords.
Prime Minister Tony Blair had preferred a solution of licensed hunting but this was shouted down in the House of Commons, particularly by the rebels in his own party.
"There are people who feel passionately that hunting is integral to their way of life. There are people who feel equally passionate that it is barbaric and cruel," Blair said Friday.
"We will now go to the courts and I have no doubt it will be an issue, but it always was going to be an issue," he said.
Lawyers for pro-hunt campaigners are expected to lodge a legal appeal.
Other fox hunting activists have simply vowed to break the law, saying it would be impossible to police the woods.
The hunters say they are preserving what they say is not just a sport but a quintessential English way of life that dates back to the period following the restoration of King Charles II in 1660.
Hundreds of thousands of people participate in fox hunts in England and Wales, with hunts staged several times a week in many parts of the country.
It supports an extensive industry which cares for, feeds and equips the horses and hounds.
Blair's Labour Party has twice been elected to power on a pledge to ban fox hunting, which animal rights activists and other opponents say is an unnecessarily cruel way to cull the animals.
Hunters argue that the foxes, which they call "vicious" and indiscriminate predators, will have to be culled by other means: shotgun, poison or even gas.
Hounds are the most natural way to control fox populations because they usually catch weak or diseased foxes, allowing the fittest to survive.
Opponents say it is both elitist and barbaric, with a pack of dogs tracking a live animal and then tearing it apart.
Opinion polls suggest that most Britons, including a large majority of city-dwellers, favour a ban.
The ban had been repeatedly approved by the Commons, only for it to be rejected by the Lords, formerly the preserve of the aristocracy and now largely made up of deputies who are life peers.
With the draft law see-sawing between the Commons and Lords for years, on Thursday the upper chamber was given a final chance to approve a modified version of the measure, delaying a ban until July 2006, but it refused.
The lower house then invoked the rarely-used Parliament Act, which allows the Commons to force a law onto the statute books single-handedly if the two houses of parliament simply cannot agree.
The 1949 Parliament Act had been used three times prior to Thursday: to lower the age of consent for homosexual sex, to allow British courts to try Nazis suspected of war crimes and to change the electoral system for selecting representatives to the European Parliament.
11/19/2004 - 16:56 GMT - AFP