Was author right to kill and eat a rabbit?

WELL done, Jeanette Winterson, for killing and eating that rabbit. What’s wrong with living in the country and eating wild rabbit? All those complaining about this most natural of activities should know that if you eat meat of any kind, but don’t want to know what it looked like before it was killed or how it was dispatched, you should keep your comments to yourself. And don’t whinge when someone follows their country dream.

ROY HEPPER, London N19. We’re presented with the usual twaddle about rabbits proliferating (Mail) but the real problem is us. We all know that bunnies can be a pest and they breed like — well — rabbits. If we left nature alone and allowed nature’s predators to do what they do best, the problem with rabbits would balance out. But, of course, our old friends the gamekeepers try to ‘control’ foxes, stoats and weasels to name but three, and knock the balance to hell.

OLIVER CRAIG, Edinburgh. WHAT a pathetic fuss about the rabbit. During two world wars, these creatures kept us fed. Our father served in World War I at only 16 and in World War II was in Dad’s Army, working a five-and-a-half-day week in a factory and helping out in the town doing plumbing when so many men were away fighting. He would also go rabbiting. If he was lucky and caught a lot, he gave the extras to our neighbours. I got the pelts and sold them to the rag & bone woman for pocket money which got me into the local cinema (6d for downstairs, plus 3d for a bag of chips).

MARY HESLAM, Wigton, Cumbria. THE reason why people are disgusted with Jeanette Winterson isn’t because she killed and ate a rabbit — she’s entitled to hunt for food and to protect her crops. It’s because she gloated about killing it, gloried in its death and presented it as a punishment execution in a creepy, Kray-like ‘I’m so violent and narcissistic that anybody who crosses me is going to die’ way. This is the same attitude that made the ‘He was a good dog, but he drank my Irn Bru’ advert such a massive own-goal.

CLAIRE M. JORDAN, West Calder, West Lothian.