HUNTING, and indeed, all wildlife crime, is a very emotive matter, I agree.

I also agree that the Great North Air Ambulance is a very worthy recipient of money generated by the Tynedale Hunt’s calendar.

However, the fact that it is a worthy cause is my main reason for complaint. It is nothing but blood money, raised to make the hunting fraternity look kind and charitable.

The Countryside Alliance is a very powerful lobby for the repeal of the Hunting Act. They are well funded, because most of the hunting set are rich, and they have powerful backers who control the Tory press.

They have all kinds of schemes to sanitise what they do, so that the general public, who are mainly against cruelty to animals, will hopefully look kindly on hunting and see it as a valuable necessity to control pests, and a glorious British tradition that makes for lovely Christmas cards and pictures on biscuit tins.

Some of the Alliance’s schemes to date involve getting school children to “adopt a hound”.

At no time are these people honest with the children and tell them that hounds who are too old or disinclined to hunt will receive a bullet. Fox hounds are not pets and can never be. They are working tools that are discarded with little thought when they are of no more value. Horses and hounds are frequently injured when out and they may have to be destroyed.

Hunters and their lackeys will twist and turn all ways to justify what they do, yet with all their money and their power they cannot alter the fact that what they do is cruel and causes suffering.

Foxes are not the demons or the pests they are made out to be.

Neither are they over running the towns and countryside as prohunters would have us believe.

In 1981 a study was made of fox numbers and, in spite of a hunting ban, the number in Britain has remained stable at around 250,000.

Another spurious claim is that foxes are decimating livestock.

Foxes don’t kill enough livestock to be termed pests and fox hunters do not kill enough foxes to be called pest controllers. There can be no argument for cruelty to any sentient creature, be it human or animal. I think it is wrong to give publicity to a bunch of bloodthirsty thugs.

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