Anti-hunt campaigners pick the wrong quarry
SIR – The details of where and when hunts meet is available to anyone upon inquiry (“Fears posting hunt details will put target on local pubs”, report, September 3).
With the ban on hunting live quarry, perhaps the anti-hunt campaigners, the RSPCA and anyone else who abhors hunting would be better occupied challenging illegal hare coursing.
The rural police lack the resources to do anything much and leave it to farmers to protect themselves as best they can from the culprits. The poor hares are merely for the tally and are often left piled in a gateway as a grim calling card. Harry White
Saffron Walden, Essex
SIR – Our beagles hunt over National Trust properties in Hertfordshire a couple of days a season. We have enjoyed an excellent relationship with the Trust’s farming tenants and have never been led to believe that the Trust was anything but happy with our behaviour.
We are now told we will have to advertise our fixtures so that anyone may know we are in the area. It does not seem right that we should be asked to expose ourselves, our hosts and the public to unknown risks from protestors – especially when the Trust should know, from the vicious and persistent trolling of its social media platforms, that those who dislike us are intent on ending hunting, even as it is presently carried out, by any means. Matthew Higgs
Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire
SIR – Tim Bonner, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, complains that there is a “lack of understanding of hunting and hunting people” at the National Trust.
What is there to understand? The Countryside Alliance and its pro-hunting lobby, not content with so-called “trail hunting”, support the outdated and barbaric hunting to death of wild animals. The National Trust, like most civilised people, does not. Gary Spring
Wareham, Dorset