A stunning and disturbing video filmed by hunt saboteurs – which helped trigger the demise of a Midlands fox hunt

Click play and you’ll rapidly feel like you’ve been sucked into one of the most visceral movies ever made, capturing nature red in tooth and claw – and by that, we mean human nature.

The camera, in the hands of hunt saboteurs protesting a Midlands fox hunt, moves so frenetically and so fast that it might give you whiplash, while also capturing loud live sound that includes screaming. All of this follows a fox being chased by hounds and riders into a semi-enclosed space – and the violent reaction of some hunters to the saboteurs filming. Things very fast get really quite violent.

This stunning video exemplifies the power of digital filmmaking and its online distribution to actualise one of the things cine-film and analogue videotape had merely promised: the moving image’s ability both to record and to protest what is otherwise unseen and in so doing enable change in the world offscreen. While the bulk of the video consists of raw footage, latter parts constructed in the editing room interpret and update what was witnessed, using various editing effects. The Atherstone Hunt has since folded and this filmic encounter was regularly cited as a key factor in its demise.