Close loopholes in the Hunting Act and end this barbarity

From: Miss K Watson, Briarlands Close, Bramhall, Stockport.

WHEN THE League Against Cruel Sports received 184 requests of suspected illegal hunting activities between late October and Boxing Day, can we be complacent about the Hunting Act as it stands?

A number of incidents in the first six weeks of the season occurred in Yorkshire.

A group maintaining hunt activity has recorded eyewitness accounts of one hunt closely harassing two deer at once, obstructing a road on their way to a club hunt, and also trespassing on a heritage site and allowing hounds to go at another deer.

Later in the season this hunt allowed hounds to savage a rescued bittern to death and also ran a fox to ground on New Year’s Day.

On New Year’s Eve, hounds of another hunt killed a fox.

They forced it to run for its life for 25 minutes – hounds can harass a terrified fox for much longer – and on the previous day it appears that Barlow terriers blocked a badger sett.

This is self-evidently not “accidental hunting”.

The “experts” in the tradition, in the last 80 years, have admitted that “pain and suffering” are inevitable, that hounds “should be savage with their fox”, that terriers get a sadistic pleasure from tormenting foxes and that controlled fox hunting is neither “efficient” nor “economic”.

If such barbarity is still going on, the loopholes in the Act must be closed, as the great majority of the public and their elected MPs require.

From: MJ Thompson, Goodison Boulevard, Cantley, Doncaster.

REGARDING the illegal trapping and shooting of protected birds of prey in North Yorkshire.

One locality seems to crop up almost all the time.

Nidderdale does have more than its fair share of the headlines in this department.

The main people who have a vested interest in keeping numbers down on the grouse moors are gamekeepers.

I find it hard to believe given the relative small numbers of people employed in this profession that the local police do not have some idea who are the perpetrators of this despicable crime.

Surely a knock on the door and a word in the ear must have an effect on their future behaviour.

If they know they are on the radar they may think twice about their actions.