It’s difficult to know where…

It’s difficult to know where to start. The cruelty of subjecting an animal to this sort of thing, being chased in an enclosure, is obviously at the top of the list. Just to begin, a wild animal running to escape a dog would suffer such fear that it could die from the trauma, it could be caught and suffer a painful death and it could well be forced to run into a fence and die that way.
We should never take the position that rabbits, for example, are part of a population which are least threatened by extinction so some of them can be exposed to terrible trauma. That is inhumane. The Canadian government recently banned the testing of cosmetics on animals and now the Ontario government wants to do this? Completely retrograde.
As well, there is no method of trapping an animal like a fox on a trap line which does not cause pain and terrible fear. There’s no need to provide documentation here.
In addition, there are no guarantees that hunting dogs are kept in humane conditions and not confined to pens and inclement weather for long periods. Competitions to see which is the best and most aggressive will only exacerbate this situation.
This isn’t the 1800s. We’re informed now about the trauma which all animals suffer and to imagine that one or five species are worthy of less compassion is just a dark comment on humans. We should be better than this.