A sound I don’t wish to hear
Dear Editor
A speaker at the recent Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss ended her moving and informative presentation by playing the sounds of species we rarely, or in some cases no longer, hear in the Irish countryside.
It made for sad listening, tinged with nostalgia and feelings about what might have been if we’d tried harder to preserve what remains of our wonderful wildlife heritage.
However, one sound I do not wish to hear in our countryside is a hare’s child-like screech on a coursing field, and a sight we can do without is that of this “flagship of Irish biodiversity” as conservationists have dubbed it, getting mauled, having its bones crushed, or being tossed into the air like a rag doll... for sport.
The Citizens’ Assembly will be making recommendations to the government at the conclusion of its deliberations. But I ask: how can we trust a government, or any combination of parties, that supports and encourages the legality of hare coursing, a practise that is a serious criminal offence in other jurisdictions?
What confidence can we have in a politician who thinks it’s okay to set dogs on one of our truly native mammals, a creature that survived the last Ice Age of 10,000 years and was probably around for eons before that... to care a fig about our imperilled biodiversity?
To entrust the care of our precious wildlife heritage, which belongs to all of us and should not be the preserve of a heartless minority, to pro-hare coursing politicians would be on a par with putting vampires in charge of the Blood Bank.
Forcing thousands of captured hares to serve as live bait; apart from the animal welfare objections to it, does little to inspire confidence in our ability to address the multi-faceted threats to biodiversity. It is a national scandal and a perennial blot on the landscape. Thankfully, public support for it is declining so that this increasingly endangered species- the Irish hare coursing fanmay soon become extinct. Thanking you, John Fitzgerald, Lower Coyne Street, Callan, Co. Kilkenny.