Horses, hounds and coyotes — Meet Canada's only woman employed as a huntsman.
Being a huntsman is an unusual career for anyone but it is doubly so for Rosslyn Balding, who numbers among only a handful of females in the profession worldwide.
Rosslyn Balding is sitting on a couch with her wool-sock-clad feet tucked comfortably beneath her. The professional huntsman has a bundle of handwritten notes in her right hand, which she keeps reminding herself, aloud, to refer to, but which she mostly keeps forgetting to check. She admits to being nervous. She has never been interviewed by a journalist before and is wary, in a most open, friendly way that, despite assurances to the contrary, I am an undercover, coyote-loving writer who has come to a 120-acre property, just south of the village of Creemore, Ont., to blow the lid off an arcane blood sport.
Long associated with the lords and ladies of the United Kingdom, fox hunting — picture men in redcoats, women in black coats, horses, hills, dales, baying hounds and a fox fleeing for dear life — has been around in the New World for almost 200 years. And it still is around a relic from another time, embodied by Balding’s employer, the 175-year-old Toronto & North York Hunt club (TNYH), and by herself, a 48-year-old single mother from Scotland. “I hope your article isn’t about killing coyotes,” she says in a sweet brogue. “Because we are not a very effective means of predator control.”
Balding lives on the club’s property with her teenage daughter and son, 52 modern English foxhounds, five English cocker spaniels, four horses, one beagle and a deer named Stag. Most of the time, the coyotes that the hounds (and riders) pursue escape, aided by tricky “scenting” conditions. That’s fox hunting-speak for a southern Ontario microclimate with differing soil types and sudden elevation and temperature changes, which pose problems for a dog’s sense of smell. The coyotes’ high survival rate isn’t viewed as a personal failure, and, to be fair, they don’t always survive.
Balding is the only woman employed as a huntsman in Canada, which has 10 accredited hunt clubs, and among only a handful of female huntsmen worldwide. “Female huntsmen are extraordinarily rare,” says Polly Winsor, a longtime TNYH member and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. “Ros is terrifically knowledgeable, honest, cheerful, energetic — and hugely skillful at what she does. She is first rate.”
TNYH has 60 members, who each pay about $2,000 a year in dues, a sum that doesn’t include the costs of owning a horse and a trailer to transport it. There are no lords or ladies among the current membership, although Lady Eaton, of Canadian department store fame, and long deceased, was a past member, while Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales, once joined a hunt during a visit to Canada in 1924.
Lately, however, the club is nearer to obscurity than its former majesty, and features a cross-section of (mostly) white-collar professionals — a lawyer, engineer, property developer, marketer, realtor, retired professor, interior designer, anesthesiologist and even a puppeteer — among its ranks. Balding runs the day-to-day operation. It’s a role that involves caring for the property, four staff horses — her mount is named Molson — wooing landowners to get access to their acreages and, critically, nurturing, training and caring for a pack of foxhounds, medium-to-large-sized dogs bred to be athletes and, in theory, if mostly not in practice, coyote killers.
“The hardships we have lived are what make us as a person. But I am not going to say it has been easy”
– ROSSLYN BALDING
Being a huntsman is an unusual career for anyone, to put it mildly. But it’s one made stranger by the path Balding has travelled to arrive at this spot, on a couch, in a small clubhouse full of oil paintings and other hints of past grandeur, a washroom with fox-patterned curtains and a portable bar with a tips jar.
Ten years ago, Balding was living happily ever after with, “the love of her life,” Owen Balding, a huntsman in the Lake District of northwest England. The pair worked alongside one another in “hunt service.” He tended the hounds; she looked after the horses. Balding insists that we are all hunters, even if we don’t know it, or care to admit it. Our ancestors ate what they killed, and the pursuit of quarry — galloping across fields, dodging obstacles, feeling the blood pulse in your temples, being surrounded by the wonders of nature — is “thrilling,” an adrenaline rush that taps something deep in our primordial core.
Besides, Balding says, she always loved horses and dogs, and aspired to study animal psychology, but she dropped out of university after a year — with the blessing of her parents, both doctors — to work at a riding school in North Yorkshire. It was her gateway to fox hunting, and it introduced her to the love of her life and, much later, to a terrible loss. Cancer took Owen in 2011, a shattering blow that ultimately propelled a single mom to Canada. “The hardships we have lived are what make us as a person,” she says. “But I am not going to say it has been easy.”
Balding started working at TNYH two years after her husband’s death. She was promoted to huntsman when her male predecessor, also from the U.K., took a job in the United States. Part of being a huntsman involves wearing a redcoat. Part of being a traditionalist from the Old Country — as Balding both is and in some ways isn’t — involves knowing that women aren’t allowed to wear redcoats, according to custom. The huntsman’s redcoat is unique among all coats, because it has five buttons, compared to three or four buttons for members and staff. “On the one side of it I was like, ‘Oh, I am a woman, and I really shouldn’t be wearing this,’” she says. “But on the other side of it I was like, ‘Oh, I am a woman, and I am wearing a redcoat — and how great is that?”
The redcoat hangs in Balding’s office closet, near a filing cabinet with a list of hounds’ names taped to its side and two stuffed animals — one fox, one hound — on top. Her hounds are her “babies,” though she claims a favourite in Signal, a square-headed pooch who pokes his head through the kennel door to receive some rubs whenever she wanders near.
There is a small brass horn on the huntsman’s desk. Balding uses it to call to the dogs, and steps outside to demonstrate on a crisp October afternoon, cautioning me to stand back before she blows into it. The blast is a cue, albeit a false alarm on this day, that a hunt has begun, and it elicits a chorus of delighted howls from 52 unseen hounds. “They are singing,” she says. “They are happy.”
Fox hunting might be an anachronism in Canada, but, overseas, it is a bitter divide, with the Brits cleaved into anti-hunt (mostly urban, upwardly mobile) and pro-hunt (mostly rural, farmers and old aristocracy) camps. “You were always cautious about saying what you did back in England,” Balding says. “You just never knew who you were speaking to, or how they might react. But people over here are intrigued. They ask me lots of questions. I have never encountered any negativity. But maybe that’s because Canadians are so polite.” Or maybe Canadians don’t like coyotes.