Macabre trade

As it was still legal to poison rats (do they still use the slow-acting, blood-clotting agent Warfarin for that, by the way?), I honestly believed that the same applied to other rodents like foxes.

The fact that one course of action is banned but not the other further demonstrates the narrowness and self defeating take the anti-hunt brigade have on animal welfare in general and makes their anti-cruelty posturings seem even more vacuous.

Penny Little's letter demonstrates this rather well.

Why is she so keen to focus on the social/familial ties of the fox population? Why not devote a similar amount of time focusing on the social/familial ties involving chickens and sheep, for example?

Is the life of a fox really more important to her than all the thousands of lambs being shipped to abbatoirs every day?

Why doesn't she wax lyrical about the pain and suffering of a lamb separated from its parents and being left to face the slaughter house?

Why doesn't she feel obliged to berate and persecute all her carnivore friends for depending on this macabre trade?

Or is it simply that, given the choice, being anti-hunting is a softer option involving a far more easily definable target than the meat industry?

Of course, it is an astute move politically to take such a position, in that were she to start targeting the latter, she would run the risk of alienating all those meat-eating hypocrites she depends on for support.

That, of course, would never do.

Alan Page, Iffley Road, Oxford