Hounding the hunters

Needless to say, I have never hunted, yet I feel very strongly about the government’s motives and methods. The hunting ban could yet prove to be a catalyst. What I now most dislike about the Government is its insistence that it knows best how we are to live our lives.

Anne Crew,

Wigton, Cumbria

Fight on the beaches

SIMON JENKINS (Comment, September 17) greatly exaggerates. The hunting debate was not the country lobby’s Waterloo. It was its Dunkirk.

The Conservatives have pledged to overturn this law if they return to power. The hundreds of thousands of supporters of foxhunting should now direct their energies not to antagonising people by disruption, but to campaigning vigorously for any parliamentary candidate who will restore the right to hunt with dogs. In the vast majority of cases this will mean supporting Conservative candidates.

We could then see D-Day landings at the next election.

Ronald Forrest,

Wells, Somerset

Culture clash

SO ENDS one of the most entertaining sessions of the House of Commons in modern history, but we should reflect. What remains, apart from endless civil unrest? This is not class war, pace Anatole Kaletsky, it is middle-class “townies” against middle-class country-dwellers, whose crime is not foxhunting (few of us do), but owning a different culture and voting Tory. Does no one care about the hunting dogs? One hundred and ninety thousand will have to be put down because they cannot live outside the pack and are no use as household pets. Even this pales beside the loss of human livelihood. And they call foxhunting cruel.

A terrible revenge will be enacted by the country folk. Hunts were seldom very successful in killing foxes, but now many thousands of these vermin will be massacred by far crueller methods: snares, gassing, poisoning, which will also affect pets and other wildlife. Foxes could be almost extinct (outside towns) in a generation.

Nigel MacNicol,

Oakham, Rutland

A sad day

I ATTENDED the Parliament Square demonstration last Wednesday. I stood most of the time on the parapet at the back and so had a fair view of what went on. The vast majority of the demonstrators were good-natured and law-abiding but a few went over the top, let off smoke bombs and pulled some barriers down.

The police went in with a hail of truncheons, aiming apparently without discimination for people’s heads.

MPs voted for a Bill which is creating social division. No doubt they will overrule the Lords who are their own appointees. As such, are not the Lords as democratically representative of the electorate as are MPs themselves? The mood has changed. The countryside has now been further alienated. I left feeling profoundly saddenned.

Incidentally, I am 68 and have never hunted in my life.

Julian Pilcher,

Steventon, Hampshire

Feudal left-overs

I AM 56, brought up and still live in a South Yorkshire ex-mining village near Doncaster. I don’t blame the foxhunting set for fighting to protect their way of life and the jobs involved in their pursuit of the fox. I just wish that the coal miners in our villages had been given an equally measured response to their concerns from the Conservative Government in power then, instead of the swift decimation that ensued, which has only succeeded in breeding crime and anti-social behaviour.

Foxhunting is a cruel and anachronistic hangover of the feudal system, and now the arrogant successors of that system are riding roughshod over the countryside. It is right that foxhunting should be done away with; then at least I can protest to my Spanish friends about bullfighting without fear of a riposte.

P. Day,

Doncaster

Double standards

IS IT not ironic that Labour preaches tolerance and inclusiveness and yet persecutes the minority who want to hunt foxes?

Edward Thompson,

London SW15

Hunting is humane

TALKING about class issues and sport in connection with hunting seems to me to miss the point entirely.

Foxes are one of the few animals that kill for sport themselves as any country-dweller can tell you. They don’t kill for food but just for the hell of it, as anyone who has seen the massacre in the farmyard after a fox has visited knows. Urban foxes regularly take cats in these parts, and they are completely unafraid of humans, sauntering through backgardens with impunity. Hunting with dogs is the most humane way of keeping the fox population under control. It’s the natural instinct of a dog to hunt, as it is for a fox. If we could ask the chickens, sheep, ponies, goats, cats and other small animals whether they would like foxhunting to be banned, the answer would be unanimous.

Annemarie Cayzer,

Chesterfield, Derbyshire

Political sacrifice

NO WONDER hunting people are angry. Their cause has been sold down the river by a government who has no interest in animal welfare, only in class hatred and political expediency. Had those concerned taken the trouble to find out, they would have met disappointingly few “toffs” in the hunting field. Animal welfare? That’s a joke. What about laboratory experiments, halal slaughter, battery hens, intensive pig farming, live export of horses to the Continent, and so on? Tell those animals they are an economic necessity, and tell the hounds, horses and foxes that will die as a result of this Bill that they must be sacrificed on the altar of bigotry and bad government.

Lucinda Roberts,

lucinda@robertszat.fsnet.co.uk

Classless cruelty

I READ Anatole Kaletsy’s article with amazement. Trying to belittle or detract from the main issue of animal welfare by turning the question of foxhunting into that of a class war smacks of a last-ditch attempt of a pro-hunt supporter trying to salvage an argument to perpetuate this obscenity.

Make no mistake, those who abuse animals span every class, as do those who care for them.

Denise Revell,

Banstead, Surrey

Taking it further

ANATOLE KALETSKY asks why opponents of foxhunting do not worry about the suffering of fish, cows or sheep. But why draw the line there?

Yesterday I swatted a wasp. I spent some time chasing it around the room, taking swipes at it with a folded newspaper (The Times, of course), and climbing over chairs in the process. When, at last, I succeeded in making contact with the wasp, I did not kill it but only knocked it on to the windowsill, where it struggled for a little before flying up to the window in a vain attempt to escape. When I finally managed to squash it, I must admit to feeling a sense of satisfaction, and the exercise of the chase undoubtedly did me some good.

If wasps were the size of foxes, would the Government now be introducing legislation to prevent me from performing this same cruel activity again?

David Gifford,

Dorking, Surrey