Green Creek/Aiken Joint Meet in Tryon, NC

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Videos

By Donald Jefferis, MFH

Here are the first twenty minutes of a fast moving fifty-minute coyote chase in the Green Creek Hounds (SC) hunting country. It was recorded on October 6, 2019 by Donald “DJ” Jefferis, MFH, Green Creek, during a joint meet with the Aiken Hounds (SC). The coyote makes a brief appearance. With the audio on, it will drive any dogs in your house wild with excitement.

DJ is Field Master and videographer, riding his big gray Irish Sport Horse, Pogue Mahone. The two riders in front through most of the run are Green Creek huntsman David Raley and Aiken huntsman Katherine Gunther. Occasionally seen in the clip, riding just behind DJ, is Wendy Collins Gutfarb, MFH, Aiken.

Tally Ho, Gone Away!

Posted October 14, 2019

AAEA Art Show Returns to Its Roots

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Art

By Norman Fine

Linda Volrath from White Post, Virginjia, with one of her oils, a handsomely mounted huntsman, Jordan Hicks, and his Piedmont foxhounds  /  Middleburg Photo

The American Academy of Equine Art, after an absence of thirty years, has returned to its original home, Middleburg, Virginia, with a delightful exhibit of equine art. The works chosen for the AAEA 39th Annual Open Juried Exhibition will be available for viewing until October 26, 2019 from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm, Monday through Saturday, at the newly occupied headquarters of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, 301 East Washington Street (U.S. Route 50), Middleburg, Virginia 20117.

The MFHA headquarters is “a beautiful facility inside and out, fully restored and expanded,” writes AAEA President Booth Malone. “The Academy plans to give them a show they can be proud of.”

Ellen Emmet Rand Exhibition “Leads the Field” at NSLM

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Art

Ellen Emmet Rand painted by Mary Foote in 1907A new exhibit, Leading the Field: Ellen Emmet Rand, opens at the National Sporting Library & Museum (NSLM) with a reception for members on October 4, 2019, and will hang through March 22, 2020. Rand was the first female student of American painter and sculptor Frederick MacMonnies, spent decades studying and painting in Paris, and for decades more was a successful portrait painter, commuting from her beloved Connecticut farm to her studio in New York City and across the country on commissions. Her subjects included sportsmen and women, captains of industry, judges, lawyers, socialites, children, and politicians—notably the first presidential portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

During a journey that fulfilled her dream of becoming a foxhunter, she crossed paths with some of the most influential sporting figures of the 1920s and 1930s, memorializing Masters of several prestigious hunts such as Fletcher Harper of Orange County (VA), Dr. Howard Collins of Millbrook (NY), and Evelyn Thayer Burr of Norfolk (MA). This important exhibition brings together several of these sporting commissions as well as paintings, studies, and sketches of the artist’s family and friends, and creates a personal picture of Rand as a fiercely talented painter, loving mother, countrywoman, and horsewoman.

On Opening (and Keeping) Foxhunting Country

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Guest Commentary

By Andy Bozdan

Hunting country is a hunt's most precious asset. The late Mrs. Nancy Hannum, MFH, Mr. Stewart's Cheshire Foxhounds, set the bar for how to protect hunting country, hers just thirty miles from Philadelphia.

The season has started and so far so good. Young hounds are entering well and have been given the space and time to work things out. But every season brings headaches the Masters can well do without.

Most field members are blissfully unaware of the amount of year-round planning that goes into every day’s hunting. During the spring and summer Masters need to go and visit their landowners and make sure they are welcome for the following season. Secondly, they need to look further afield to increase their hunting country. Why? Because there are too many ways good country can be lost. Here’s one that I experienced.

The Recognizable Foxhounds of John Emms

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Art

By Norman Fine

The New Forest Foxhounds by John Emms

John Emms (1843–1912) is one of the most admired animal painters of the nineteenth century. He was an avid foxhunter himself, and his paintings of foxhounds are easily recognizable as clearly and uniquely his work. The postures, characteristic attitudes, and expressions of Emms foxhounds, in kennels especially, confirm his hand before even seeing his signature. I can stare from one hound to the other and the essence of his foxhounds will awaken even my olfactory senses and suggest my presence in a well-kept foxhound kennel.

Essex Fox Hounds Master’s Chase: A Good Community Event

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Latest

By Alexis Tarrazi

Pony stick racing over hurdles  /  Priscilla K. Miller photo

The Master’s Chase is a fun-filled annual event that hunts can put on as a fund raiser for a worthy cause and reach out to their community of non-riders as well. Billed as “family fun for horse and non-horse people alike,” Essex Fox Hounds Master’s Chase will feature amateur racing for field hunters and ponies, adults and children, tailgating, and a group of local vendors at Natirar Park, 2 Main Street, in Peapack, New Jersey on Saturday, October 5, starting at noon. The day is sandwiched between a weekend of events with a Friday night party and a Sunday hunt.

It all traces back to the Farmer’s Day Races of the early twentieth century in which hunt clubs invited farmers in their hunting countries to a picnic and day at the races. For those hunts that do not hold annual point-to-points or sanctioned steeplechase races, it’s a fine way to keep racing alive and give everyone a taste of the excitement. The Essex Fox Hounds donate all proceeds to the non-profit Countryside Alliance of Somerset Hills for the preservation of farmlands.

I Was the Vixen’s Designated Kit-Sitter

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Wildlife

By Dave Ellis, Wildlife Photographer

Dave Ellis photo

I had found the den of a family of red foxes and was going early each morning to take pictures of the mother and her young kits. The kits were five or six weeks old, and were at that curious, exploring stage. Their life at that point pretty much consisted of eat, sleep, and play.

The father did not seem to be around, so the vixen had a lot of work to keep her four kits fed and safe. She was not stupid. She soon figured out that she could make use of me. She had to spend several hours each day off in the woods hunting in order to keep the little ones fed, which meant that without a father around, she would have to leave them alone and subject to being found by other predators.

Louis “Paddy” Neilson, MFH

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Remembrance

Paddy Neilson, MFH, whipping-in at Cheshire / Jim Graham photoLegendary horseman Louis “Paddy” Neilson III, MFH, died Thursday, September 5, 2019 at the age of seventy-seven. He was the husband of Toinette Phillips Neilson, with whom he shared thirty-one years of marriage.

Paddy served as Master, alongside his daughter, Sanna, of Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds (PA) and was a winning race rider and trainer. He hunted with Cheshire since childhood and served as full-time honorary whipper-in for the last thirteen years of his life, jumping his last fence in the line of duty just a couple of weeks before his death.