She was the daughter of the Master of the Hunt and grew up in the hunting community. By the age of seven or eight she was blooded after witnessing a fox being killed by hounds.
Five decades on, Anna Bye, 57, is a thorn in the side of the Essex and Suffolk Hunt - having ridden with the same group as a young child.
She now turns up on meet days with a group of monitors - their aim to record any potential breaches of the law on hunting with hounds.
"I know them all - not well, but I know them all," she says of the hunt participants.
For her, fox hunting was never an enjoyable experience. Her pony - more suited to competitions - didn't like it either. During her first hunt her face was smeared with the blood of the fox by the huntsman - an old tradition.
"I remember to this day being blooded and being given a fox's paw that I had to put with my sandwiches and I can still remember the sick feeling I had all day," she says.
"I was cold, tired and then bored and if it wasn't those I felt sick from the killing of the animal if I saw it."
She thinks she probably voiced her opposition to hunting by the age of 11. But it was her decision to become vegetarian aged 14 her parents reacted to more strongly, she recalls. She has been vegan on and off most of her adult life.
Trail hunting - which is practised by the Essex and Suffolk Hunt - involves laying an animal scent for a pack of hounds to follow.
The Labour Party - now voted into power - pledged to end the practice in its 2024 manifesto after complaints that it was effectively providing a back door to hunting live animals.
This is vehemently denied by trail hunt supporters who claim they act within the law. They are hoping to persuade the new government to perform a u-turn.
But critics argue that packs are known to pick up real animal scents and follow them - leading to animal deaths or stress. Prosecutions - although sometimes successful - have been challenging because hunts argue that such incidents are accidental.
"We would like to work with them as a group," says Anna. "We are the best thing they could have because we could go out and monitor what they are doing - but they simply don't want to work with us."
Despite the polarised opinions she will sometimes talk with the hunt supporters in their vehicles and when a rider fell from her horse during a hunt they helped her out, she says.
Anna currently lives near to the farm at Offton, near Stowmarket, where she grew up. It's close to the heart of the hunt community.
Despite her divergence on hunting, her outdoors upbringing is still reflected in some of her other hobbies and lifestyle choices.
Up until a decade ago, she owned her own horse, but today she keeps two excitable silver-coated Weimeraner gun dogs named Seven and Nine - a breed once used to hunt big game such as boar or deer. She's a keen clay shooter and also has a pilot's licence.
As a youngster, she attended the School of Jesus and Mary - now part of St Joseph's in Ipswich. In her teenage years, she rebelled. She loved learning but hated education, she says. She began as a mortgage broker at the age of 21 and it's a career she has stuck with ever since.
While today her views are still at odds with those of her sister and her mother, neither believe in breaking the law, she says.
"They are both law-abiding people and they don't agree with what's going on at the moment," she says. "My mother thinks I'm either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid - she hasn't decided yet. She's very strong-minded."
Apart from a brief spell when she lived in Wales, Suffolk has always been Anna's home and is where she brought up her own family.
Her late father Geoffrey Bye - who died in 2008 - was a farmer and a keen hunting enthusiast who chaired the Essex and Suffolk Hunt Supporters' Club for a number of years. Her mother - who is still alive - was Master of the Hunt back in the 1980s.
She has ridden horses for as long as she can remember. Her parents bought her a pony at a young age and she competed in show jumping, dressage, cross country and continued with eventing up to the age of 48.
She claims that since she started her campaign against trail hunting three years ago she has been subjected to abuse by pro-hunt supporters.
"It has been quite difficult I will say. I can drive down Hadleigh high street and have people stick their fingers up at me," she says. "It's insane." Anna returns the gesture with a wave.
She is called hurtful names, her tyre has been slashed and a dead rabbit has been left over the sign at the gate at the bottom of her garden, she adds. These incidents she believes are related to her animal activism.
"I have had numerous threats of people threatening to do things that are revolting to me," she says.
Anna began her campaign after becoming suspicious that foxes were still being chased at her local hunt.
"I went and watched and because I had been hunting and looked and thought: 'They are just hunting,'" she says. "That was basically the birth of it."
She launched Suffolk Action for Wildlife - which she chairs - and the group started turning up at the hunt's twice-weekly or sometimes thrice-weekly meets equipped with cameras or recording devices so that they could observe what happened.
Her group has been "hugely successful", she says and she believes it has made the hunting community reflect on their practices.
The group has about 1,000 Facebook followers and a core of about 40 volunteers who turn up at meets. These are local country people mainly in their 40s, 50s and 60s.
"We are all people like me - we are adults, working, intelligent local people. We know the people who are out hunting - know your enemy and things like that. We have got the inside track and people tell us stuff because we are local."
One of her bugbears is police resource. She recalls that when fox hunting was still legal and protests reached a pitch, police officers turned up on dirt bikes to protect the hunt. "Now it's illegal the funding just isn't there," she says.
Richard Cranfield, chairman of Essex and Suffolk Hunt, said trail hunting was within the law and argued that the practice should be allowed to continue.
"When the Hunting Act was passed what was said at the time was you should go trail hunting. That's what the Labour government said in 2004. Drag hunting is typically a sport where you have very few hounds and they don't hunt as a pack. It's all about speed. It's about people who want to jump 20, 30, 40 fences very quickly," he said.
"Trail hunting has been developed to basically take the hounds who have been about for 250 years and hunt as a pack. They are much slower and spend a lot of time deliberately searching for a scent."
He added of Anna Bye: "She has not been abused by us but she has been asked to leave private property on a regular basis."
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