Hunting perception 'naive' (From Gazette Series)

Hunting perception 'naive'

SIR - If Mrs Menelaws' rather nave perception of hunting was correct, I would probably support it myself.

She obviously didn't see the film on Points West earlier this year, taken during a local hunt, which showed a fox on its back in a ditch, caked in mud, its sides heaving, its eyes bulging with terror, whimpering as the hounds tore its stomach open. I quote an extract from a letter I received from the League Against Cruel Sports in reply to mine asking why they didn't show such films:

"A BBC reporter told us that some films he had seen were too ghastly to show on TV. The media doesn't show such dreadful pictures before the watershed and often not afterwards. The most peaceful film we have, on terrier work which is a part of hunting, has reduced people including some MPs, to tears".

Nature has nothing whatsoever to do with this man-made activity. And I don't think that there is much that is natural about people who consider that exhausting, terrifying and killing animals constitutes a "good day out".

Maggie Hughes, Bradley Road, Wotton-under-Edge