I see what you mean although I'm not sure I'd consider Charles cruel. Perhaps of another time...which is rapidly disappearing.
http://www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/the_north_east/archive/2002/03/27/40.harr.html
"A lifelong opponent of hunting, I confess to a misgiving that, through my share in the groundswell of opinion that will sweep away hunting, I will also bear responsibility for denying these hunt supporters a reason to get out and about in their countryside, with the opportunity to meet others that this brings. These roadside gatherings are more social occasions than sport.
Even so, hunting must go. Sensibilities change, and time has caught up with hunting, just as it caught up with badger baiting, bull baiting, cock fighting and dog fighting. Indeed, a telling point against hunting is that none of its defenders ever seeks to justify any of the bloodsports already banned. And yet cock fighting was once a fashionable activity, popular with the nobs at York races, among others.
Well within our own time, otter hunting was fiercely defended. But it is unthinkable that the return of the otter will be accompanied by any attempt to hunt it.
So too with foxhunting. It matters little that there is not an absolute majority favouring a ban. The sport is sufficiently offensive to a sufficient proportion of people that it can no longer be part of what Britain is. After a generation or so without hunting, people will gaze upon pictures of Prince Charles hunting with the same horrified amazement that we look upon pictures of the Duke of Windsor standing proudly over his first shot lion.
In due course, I am certain, angling and game-shooting will be outlawed. And that won't be because "ignorant, prejudiced'' people, to quote William Hague on anti-hunters, are waging a class war, or a town-v-country war. Most anglers are urban. It will be because perceptions of cruelty, and the rights of animals, a concept that would have been considered ludicrous 200 years ago, will have moved on again. For the same reason all meat-eating will eventually cease.
All that may take a century or more. For the moment there is the certain death of hunting to contemplate. If it survives the present hiatus, it still has no long-term future. But its demise should give no one unalloyed satisfaction. A barbarism will have disappeared. But community life in the countryside, already diminished by the influx of commuters, second homers and job losses, will have suffered a little more erosion. Only the most fanatical and blinkered of hunt protestors will fail to detect a note of sadness in the last Tally Ho."
