Thank you for filling in Defra's trail hunting consultation, which will help determine how the government regulates trail hunting in England and Wales. The deadline for filling in this consultation is 18th June 2026.

Trail hunting—laying animal-based scent trails for dogs to follow—routinely results in foxes and other wild mammals being chased and killed, sometimes by accident, often as a smokescreen for illegal hunting. The government has committed to banning it, but how the ban is drafted will decide whether it actually ends the killing or just hands the hunts another set of loopholes to exploit. The hunt lobby will respond to this consultation in force; if you want this ban to actually work, your voice on the other side matters.

The form should take less than 15 minutes. We've pre-filled suggested answers and provided talking points for the open-text questions based on adapted guidance from the League Against Cruel Sports and other research, but everything is editable—change whatever you'd like.

When filling it out, please keep the following points in mind:

• Reword the suggested talking points in your own voice rather than copying them directly. Whenever you can, add your own connection to the issue, even briefly. Consultation processes give more weight to individual responses than to identical ones.

• If you don't know the answer to a question, or aren't convinced by the reasoning behind a suggested talking point, please choose "Don't know" rather than using our suggestion.

• Questions marked with an asterisk are mandatory. The others are optional, though we encourage you to answer as many as you can.