Rights & wrongs of sport shooting

VISIT Scotland and bring your gun (Under fire: anger as VisitScotland promotes shooting of hares for sport, News, October 22). A foreign gentleman poses beside a heap of white hare; lunch for the party is served from the mandatory Land Rover. A goose trailing its wing flaps down the mud; its carcass will float with the tide; the brave sportsman lies behind the bank, waiting for a better shot.

For the sporting “toff”, wounding a stag in its guts to my days poaching a hind for the salt barrel, I’ve seen it all. Elitism is a pernicious condition: it turns cruelty into cash and jobs, while the shooters call themselves conservationists.

Iain R Thomson Cannich

SHOOTING and eating a legal quarry species surely has at least as much merit as buying factory-farmed, pre-prepared parts of animals which have never experienced the wild and probably contain antibiotics.

John Robins of Animal Concern calls for a total ban on fox hunting (Let’s end fox hunting for good, Letters, October 29). He obviously feels it is acceptable for groups to drive around the country dressed in combat gear with their faces masked when they are hunt saboteurs. He calls for “no more than two muzzled hounds to be used to flush out foxes to be shot”. But two hounds would have virtually zero chance of flushing a fox. The fox is not torn to bits but legally shot by the rifleman.

Mr Robins represents Animal Concern yet shows no concern for the species upon which foxes predate. Ask anyone who has found all their chickens slaughtered when a fox gains access to the hen house.

This camouflaged class warfare displays a total lack of understanding of the countryside

David Stubley Prestwick