The claim by the League Against Cruel Sports that 62 per cent of hunts are still breaking the law is a bold one to make, particularly when so few cases end up in court, and so few of those end in successful prosecution.

But this remains the most polarised debate in modern society, and there will be many anti-hunt campaigners, as well as country folk who, tired of seeing out of control hounds bounding through their gardens, will look at the figure and wonder why it is so low.

The outraged hunters, who feel they are being smeared by statistics say, with a certain degree of justification, 'prove it', and will add the lack of convictions among their ranks is the only statistic they need.

But the League Against Cruel Sports has dared to say something they haven't really done before – namely that hunts are getting away with breaking the law. In the past they have been reluctant to say this, because the follow-on question is one for them – they effectively wrote the law, why doesn't it work then?

The hunt law includes just one word that almost negates the rest of it – intent. The reality is that hunts can continue to do exactly what they were doing before – ride around the countryside behind a pack of hounds – but now if those hounds chase and kill a fox it is 'an accident', because the hunt master did not 'intend' that to happen.

All the other indicators: stopping up holes, terriermen on quadbikes, hounds on railway lines; merely suggest a hunt might be 'testing the limits' of a law which has so many holes that you could – and they do – drive a pack of hounds through it.

The hunts have got on with it quietly, realising the ban isn't really a ban at all – it's little more than a ban on being open about killing foxes, rather than actually doing it. The League know that too, because the police will have told them virtually every time they present them with a video showing a fox running away from hounds running in front of a mounted following, that it does not prove intent so won't stand up in court.

So now we are faced with a choice: the police can enforce the law properly, which would undoubtedly mean a major deployment of resources to prove both the crime and the intent, or the League and their anti-hunt colleagues need to admit the law needs a serious look at.

That will not, of course, happen. There is no stomach to revisit such a divisive an issue so apparently unimportant in the greater scheme of things. In fact, the best they can hope for in a free vote in parliament is that enough Liberal Democrats and urban Tories vote against repeal.

The hunters, however, also have some explaining to do. They have retreated following the ban, back to their closed-world shell of secrecy and furtiveness, albeit in the face of the hated monitors. Questions about why they do still have terriermen following them around, why burrows and setts are still filled in, why hounds do still kill the odd pet cat, need to be answered – otherwise they remain open to these smears by statistics.