Re: Is this "sports club"
Once we started farming, dogs needed to either be domesticated or dead.
Being low status, had the fox got into the sports club its best strategy would have been to kill all the humans and scatter result about a bit before a higher status predator was attracted and displaced it from the kill - no one has told the fox's genes that we killed all the wolves.
Despite not despatching one, that fox changed those people's behaviour. This suggests the neural routing of any species can be changed by a bit of chasing around. It then follows that the men and women (this isn't golf) on horseback are doing a valuable job teaching the nasty little vermin some fear even if they don't ever catch one.
And townies who think vermin deserves fair play haven't thought that one through, rats have no emetic response so it's hardly fair to poison them is it? Cities - you're never more that ten feet from a Guardian reading idiot.