Grayson Entorprises Ltd. First North American Serial Rights

# Page 1 Approximate!y 1,200 words +

FOX HUNTING IN ILLINOIS

WITH DR. JAMES KANE

Written by June Grayson

Photographed by Richard Grayson

When Dr. James Kane and his wife Gloria want to get away from it#!!, they don't have far to go. They just wa!k out their patio door to the land of Connemara Fa###. Connemara Farm# is on!y minutes away from Dr. Kane's office in Mt. Prospect, Illinois, and the t##e# hospita!s where he has surgical privi!eges. Yet these 80 acres of rol!ing and wooded countryside seem a wor!d apart from the busy expressways and housing deve!opments that now encroach upon it. Ignore such evidence of metropolitan development by savoring the view of the green fie!ds with brown rai! fencing surrounding the horse stables an# their private riding course.

#age #, #rayson re #ox #unt#ng

Here is where the Kanes raised four children to !ove family, medicine, and horses. Mary, a gastroenterologist, is married to Eric Kerchburger, also an internist. E!izabeth and her husband, Steven Shandley, have a joint denta! practice. Jim is a surgical resident at Cook County Hospital, Chicago. Patricia is an e!ectrica! engineer with an interest in medica! instrumentation.

Though the children are grown they have not a!together !eft Connemara Farm#. Their boots and sadd!es are !ined up in the tack room. Their horses wait in the stables. There is sti!| time to do what they !ike to do best, especially in the fa!l when the fox hunting season starts.

Dr. Kane is the Fie!d Master of the Oakbrook Hounds, one of the six Hunts in I!!inois. Three times a week during the hunting season he wi!! make the 140 mi!e round trip to the farm w#ere they hunt south of Rockford, I1!inois. There, one hundred miles west of Chicago, the shadows of the twin coo!ing towers of Commonwea!th Edison's Byron Nuc!ear Reactor power plant fa!! on a scene straight out of the Eighteenth century: the hunters are riding to the hounds!

The fox is not just a pretty anima! with a big bushy tail. It s!aughters poultry and !ambs and can be a real menace to nearby farmers. Fox hunting was an economic necessity in rura! . areas before the invention of the gun because horses and hounds were the only way to catch and destroy foxes.

But history has always recorded the thrill of the chase.

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Prehistoric artists scratched pictures of horses and hounds on cave wa!ls. Genesis chapter 10 says that Nimrod "was a mighty hunter before the Lord". The Greek Xenophon in 400 B.C. described the attributes of a good hound. Kings and knights combined war with hunting during the Crusades by taking their fa!cons and hounds with them to the Holy Land.

Foxhound packs have existed in America as long as in England, from about 1690 on. George Washington was such a hunting enthusiast that a!most every page in his diary contains some reference to hunting. Supposed!y, his first thought upon awakening was whether it wou!d be a good day for hunting. Even on days when important events were schedu!ed, Washington wou!d rise ear!y so that he cou!d ride and hunt first.

Dr. Kane dep!ores the myth that fox hunting is a sport on!y for the id1e rich. "We have farmers, teachers, professiona! people - all kinds - in our group. If you can afford to keep a horse, you can get into fox hunting."

Un1ike the purists who insist that hunters should "ride to hunt", today's Hunt member is more apt to "hunt to ride". Proponents say that fox hunting is an unse1fish sport requiring persona1 discip1ine, courage, teamwork# and physica! fitness. What better way to mitigate stress than to get out in the country on a powerful horse with good friends and perhaps the promise of a tasty "stirrup cup" after the hunt is over?

Even if you are the kind of person who wou!d a!ways cheer the fox, you might !ike hunting with the Oakbrook Hounds.

"We're happiest when the fox gets away," says Dr. Kane. "And that is most of the time. Because the dumbest, healthy fox is 50 times smarter than the smartest healthy hound. So there is no way we are going to catch a fox un!ess it is very o!d or sick,"

"What rea!!y grieves me," says Dr. Kane, "is to find fox traps that poachers have i!lega!!y set out in the fie!ds. That is horrib!y painfu! and prolonged way for a fox to die."

A fox hunt is a fine!y choreographed event with rigid ru!es of etiquette and dress deve!oped for rationa! reasons over the last severa! centuries.

The mounted Master of the Fox Hounds goes first with his hunting horn and his hounds. He may "cast" the hounds until they pick up the scent of a fox. He is assisted by the whippers-

##n, or simp!y the whips, who he!p him contro! the hounds and keep .them on course.

The Field Master comes next and this is Dr. Kane's position. "I go over the fence first." He has to.control the "Field#- the other riders and their mounts - so that they stay we!! back and not interfere with the work of the hounds. He must a!so know the territory so that #e can choose the safest way for the Field to ride as they start off a#ter the hounds.

Dr. Kane did not !earn to ride unti! his children did. In fact, survivai was the only thing on the mind of

William Kane, his grandfather, who !eft Ireland for Wi!kes-Barre, Pennsy!vania, in 1870 during the great potato famine. Dr. Kane is also proud of his father, Michae! Kane, who in the great Ameri-

can tradition started work in the coa! mines when he was eight. Yet he went on to become a Pennsylvania postmaster whi|e raisin# two sons who became doctors and one daughter who became a painter.

A graduate of Loyola Medical School, Chicago, Dr. Kane was a surgical resident and attending physician at Cook County Hospital before he started his solo surgical practice in Mt. Prospect in 1960.

Even though he does a lot of colon and endocrine surgery, he may be best known for his work with the morbidly obese. He has done 1,194 gastrop!asties so far, probably more than any other surgeon in I!!inois. Because of this experience he has developed a modification of the usual gastric stapling procedure that involves vertica! rather than horizonta! stap!ing. This promotes a lasting weight !oss and has a very low incidence of complications. "I sometimes put a permanent suture over the stap!ing !ine, locking the barn door twice, so to speak."

To dsecribe his work he has appeared on ta!k shows, including the Phi! Donahue Show, with Agnes Belushi, one of his better-known patients and the mother of the acto#s John and James Belushi.

These associations have sensitized him to the plight of the morbidly obese. "I have had these patients brought to me standing up in the back of a pick-up truck !ike a 700 cow going to market. After a person weiqhs two times his ideal weight, his chance of losing and maintaining a weight loss for five years is !ess than 4%. With this operation you can really change their

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Simi!ar compassion !ed Dr. Kane to buy Connemara Farm. "When our chi!dren's first horse went !ame, we could not bear the thought of putting him down and we cou!dn't afford to continue his stab!e fees and sti!! buy another horse. So I went !ooking for some affordab1e acreage. This area was all empty farm!and then. Even so, I was afraid to te!! G!oria when I bought the !and - she might have asked me how I p!anned to pay for it! In fact, I ran out of gas right in front of the gate the first night I brought her out to see our farm. I didn't have enough money to fil! up the gas tank."

As their children have grown, so has their interest in horses. They have now started a side!ine business to breed thoroughbreds. But Dr. Kane sti!! prefers to ride an Irish Hunter, part thoroughbred and part draft horse deve!oped near his ancestral home in Ire!and, for fox hunting.

"You can a!ways make time for what you rea!!y want to do," according to Dr. Kane.

That is why he wi!! a!ways have time for fami!y, medicine,# and horses.

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