Will 26 December this year be the last time foxes are not accidentally hunted on Boxing Day? If Labour has its way, the scarlet coats will be eaten by moths, and the dogs will presumably live happily ever after on a farm from whence they will not write letters.

In a country that is both madly mawkish about animal welfare and highly urbanised, there can be no other outcome. The hunters will make a great deal of noise, but the social conditions for the toleration of their hobby have simply gone. Even the House of Lords won’t block it, unlike last time, when it consumed 700 hours of Parliament’s time. Life peers don’t normally own horses, and the ermine robes they hire are certainly artificial fur.

Why do people hunt on Boxing Day? As a city man, I had assumed that it was to relieve the indigestion of Christmas. Indeed, this may be true. For a long time, there was a widespread belief, particularly in the north of England, that the game laws did not apply on the feast day of St Stephen. These laws, rooted in the Anglo-Saxon forest regulations, punished the hunting of game by the lower classes with extreme severity.

Thus, the day after Christmas was earmarked by all classes, low and high, for orgies of animal killing. Everything from owls to squirrels to, of course, foxes, was hunted. It was simply that some did it with the letters MFH (Master of Foxhounds) behind their names. In its way, the bloodletting of that day was egalitarian — not that it will sway Labour.

There is an even more venerable tradition on Boxing Day, that of wren hunting, often done by roving gangs of young boys. What has the poor thing done to deserve an entire day devoted to its murder? According to one rationale, when St Stephen tried to escape his martyrdom, a wren woke up his guards. In another one, St Stephen had a pet bird, which was stoned with him when he died for Our Lord. The latter one is puzzling — should we not want to celebrate the animal which kept company with the first martyr of Christendom? Scholars tell us that this is post hoc justification of a pagan ritual within a Christian country. But we’ve all had enough of experts and will not listen to them.

The death-knell of foxhunting will kill another great British tradition, that of “hunt saboteurs”. Macaulay said that Puritans “hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators” and I rather think the same of these latter-day Puritans. Oh well, there will be other causes to move on to, Gaza and oil companies and whatnot.

The need to do violence to living beings for fun is a deep-seated one, and I suppose it makes sense that it should be concentrated on landmark days, as opposed to spread throughout the year. But we live in an age where one can see soldiers being killed in high-definition thousands of kilometres away, and make a mock of their death below the line in the comments section. Hunting and going out to do it seem positively quaint in contrast. Perhaps we have merely traded one form of blood sport for another one. In any event, happy St Stephen’s Day.

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Yuan Yi Zhu is an academic and writer.

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