BBC Podcast Exposes UK's Illegal Hare Coursing Crime Wave
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- Buried: Dead Rabbit, a 10-part BBC Sounds podcast by journalists Dan Ashby and Lucy Taylor, investigates illegal hare coursing after ~20 animal carcasses — including a muntjac deer with its head severed — were dumped outside a Hampshire school in 2024
- The investigation links banned hare coursing (illegal in the UK since 2005) to organised crime, with more than 8,500 incidents reported to police in the last three years and farmers driven to suicidal despair
- Chris Packham, who was car-bombed in 2021, joins the investigation and calls the findings "insidious and macabre…sickening"; his home has previously been targeted with dead animals and human excrement
- Top hunting dogs sell for £50,000, bets are placed on the dark web from China to the US, and a glitzy "Super 8 cup" trophy exists for an underworld hare-coursing championship the journalists initially dismissed as hype
- Groups of balaclava-clad men in 4x4 convoys seize farmland and retaliate against resisters with hospitalisation injuries (broken legs, collapsed lungs), rape threats, and dogs being kidnapped and skinned
- A police and crime commissioner told the journalists he fears hunters may now be "inside the police", comparing the situation to Line of Duty as major operations against the hunters "mysteriously never quite work"
- The activity is spreading from Essex to North Yorkshire, with younger participants from different backgrounds and social-media "flexing" replacing the old image of a "quaint country pursuit," per Taylor
Why it matters: The investigation documents 8,500-plus police-reported incidents in three years, dogs changing hands for £50,000, and a senior commissioner fearing infiltration inside police forces — concrete evidence that organised criminal networks have colonised rural Britain in ways the public and authorities have largely ignored.
