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By Taruka Srivastava, Freelance journalist

August 25, 2022 | 3 min read

‘The World’s Worst Sport’ spot by Engine Creative takes aim at hunters setting their dogs on young cubs as training for fox hunting season.

Keep The Ban, a non-profit organization that campaigns against the hunting of wildlife for sport, has shown the cruelty of killing fox cubs in a TV sports show parody.

Created by Engine Creative, which is officially launching as House 337 in September, the 118-second film titled ‘The World’s Worst Sport’ features a TV sports presenter and expert commentator in a studio discussing the countdown to a cubbing session like how they would do a football match, while also interacting with a reporter ‘live’ from a field housing a family of foxes.

The film spotlights the process of ‘cubbing’, the equivalent of the ‘pre-season’ for fox hunting, which typically occurs in late August and September and involves hunters training their dogs to kill fox cubs as they are easier to catch than adult foxes.

The film will run across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. As per the official statement, the practice is responsible for slaughtering thousands of defenseless fox cubs in England and Wales each year. Yet few members of the public know about it – 88% of people have never heard of it and just 5% know what it is, making cubbing one of foxhunting’s dirtiest secrets – but when it is explained, 69% of people are against it, according to Keep The Ban research conducted in July 2022.

Under the 2004 Hunting Act, fox hunting, deer hunting and hare hunting are illegal in the UK. Several exemptions under the act are used by fox hunts to avoid prosecution, however, making it difficult for the police and Crown Prosecution Service to enforce the hunting ban – a situation Keep The Ban is campaigning to change.

Rob Pownall, founder of Keep The Ban, said: “It is 2022, and there are people going out ripping fox cubs to pieces. It’s shocking and bizarre. That is exactly what this film encapsulates – a normalization of an almost surreal pastime continues to occur across the UK. Using an easily recognizable format, we could expose this grotesque activity to a new audience.”

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