THE foxhunting community in Kent is preparing to join pro-hunt campaigners across the country in preparing a legal challenge to overturn a ban on hunting in England and Wales.

MPs have used the Parliament Act to push through a ban which will outlaw fox and deer hunting and hare-coursing with dogs from next February.

The Countryside Alliance is challenging the legitimacy of the 1949 Act. It also claims the ban does not comply with some aspects of the Human Rights Act.

Many campaigners are also threatening civil disobedience and say they will attempt to unseat Labour MPs who voted for the ban at the next General Election which is likely to be held early in 2005.

Pro-hunt campaigners insist their way of life will be changed for ever. Mark Bycroft, huntsman for the Old Surrey, Burstow and West Kent Hunt, said the change in the law would end what has been a centuries-old tradition.

But Gillingham Labour MP Paul Clark, who voted in favour of a ban, said the concern was now about people who would defy the law.

He stressed: "What we have to worry about now is the lengths that people are going to go to defy the law of the land."

Members of the East Kent Hunt rode out from Aldington, near Ashford, on Wednesday for what could be one of their last legal hunts.

More than 30 horsemen and women with a pack of 60 hounds gathered at the Walnut Tree pub.

The landlady there, Karen Barrett, said: "I think it is sad. The hunters are all country folk born and bred and people in the big cities just don't understand this way of life."