Hunt Saboteurs Association

The Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) is an organization that uses direct action to stop fox hunting. The HSA have been using the same basic tactics since their inception in 1963, the underlying principle being to disrupt a day's hunting.

In 1964 John Prestige founded the Hunt Saboteurs Association in Brixham, England, after being assigned to report on the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, where "he witnessed the hunters drive a deer into a village and kill her." Designed to "violently oppose blood sports," the HSA eschewed parliamentary reforms and instead went directly out onto hunting grounds to do everything they could, sometimes breaking the law and being consequently arrested, to prevent the killing of British wildlife. "Within a year, HSA groups appeared across England in Devon, Somerset, Avon, Birmingham, Hampshire and Surrey. Ronnie Lee, founder of the animal rights group Band of Mercy (and later the Animal Liberation Front), began his activism within an HSA group in Luton, England. HSA now operates throughout Europe and North America. Hunt saboteurs often refer to themselves as "sabs" or monitors (to reflect that they are gathering evidence of illegal activity) but are typically called "antis" (short for "anti-hunter") by hunters.

A group of hunt saboteurs appear as a critical plot element in the 1963 film The List of Adrian Messenger.

The HSA uses tactics such as: hunting horns and whistles to misdirect hounds, spraying scent dullers, laying false trails, and locking gates to interfere with the progress of a hunt. In the mid-1990s members used a "gizmo" (a portable cassette tape player linked up to a megaphone or other portable amplification equipment) to play the sound of hounds in cry, causing the dogs to break off the chase. These are examples of "non violent direct action tactics".

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