The conclusion of a year-long High Court action between a West Sussex hunt and a group of animal rights activists brings to mind the ‘visceral’ extremes of emotion aroused by the introduction of the Hunting Act 2004, which prohibited the hunting of wild mammals – including foxes and stags – with dogs.

You had to watch your tongue in rural areas during the build-up to the act becoming law. Raise the topic of the new act, as is a legal journalist’s wont, and the solicitors you were interviewing would glance over their shoulders before whispering a response.

Why the paranoia? ‘There’s visceral opposition to the act,’ they would mutter. ‘And I don’t want to get home and find my car vandalised or my outbuildings on fire.’

Even the normally genteel Any Questions on BBC Radio Four was touched by the controversy, with an MP in favour of the ban being barracked from the floor when the show visited the West Country.

Elsewhere in the country, opinion was divided. Many urban dwellers couldn’t care tuppence what happened to mangy flea-ridden foxes. They wondered why parliament, instead of addressing child poverty or, even, the war in Iraq, was wasting time on the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as Oscar Wilde put it. Other townies were outraged at the maltreatment of cuddly Reynard or, in the case of stag hunts, Bambi’s extended family.

One West Country solicitor, who lives the rural idyll in an isolated farmhouse on Exmoor, less sentimentally talked of her fear that the ideological clash between pro- and anti-hunters could lead to someone’s death. ‘Some hunt supporters roar around the countryside on quad bikes, terrorising innocent tourists and protesters alike. They’re the hunt’s version of football hooligans. One day there’ll be an accident.’

She was wrong, as it happened, and the act passed into law without fatalities. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Many hunters, in every other respect pillars of society, have loudly declared their intention to disobey the Hunting Act. It’s pick and choose legislation. They’ll support the law when it comes to protecting people’s property and lives, they’ll pay taxes and not drink and drive, and they won’t rustle their neighbour’s cattle or shoplift at Waitrose.

But they will continue to hunt wild mammals with dogs because it’s their ‘heritage’ – and if the legislators in parliament don’t like it, they can take a running jump into the conveniently adjacent River Thames.

Which brings us back to the court action that concluded earlier this month. The Crawley and Horsham Hunt, supported by the Countryside Alliance, the Masters of Foxhounds Association and some local landowners, sought an injunction against the individuals who persistently monitor their hunting with video cameras.

These individuals would be banned from the landowners’ land and, where a right of way existed, would be prohibited from standing still (seriously!) on it. They were to be allowed ‘passage and re-passage’ only, the defendants’ solicitor, Victoria Pogge von Strandmann of London firm Fisher Meredith, told the Gazette.

The defendants, or hunt monitors, as they style themselves, a group called the West Sussex Wildlife Protection Group, were undeterred by the threat of legal action. This despite one of them claiming he had been ridden down by the hunt and had his nose and teeth broken in the process.

The case did not get off to a good start in the courts. The judge in the first trial, in July 2008, was conflicted out when it emerged he was a former MP who had campaigned for a ban on hunting. The next trial, in October 2008, was adjourned following a High Court ruling dismissing the claimants’ claims of trespass and nuisance. July 2009 saw the hunt dropping injunction proceedings and agreeing to pay the defendants’ legal costs.

As von Strandmann said: ‘These proceedings should never have been brought.’ Except reason goes out the door – you could say people go barking mad - whenever the ‘visceral’ subject of hunting with dogs rears its head.