DERRICK Holt (Letters, February 5) rightly draws attention to the demonisation of foxes that is a necessary pre-requisite to their persecution by the blood sports brigade.

However, foxes are not the only targets of this form of recreational abuse – for instance, hares are also regarded as ‘fair game’.

Cameron’s former school, Eton College, offers beagling as an optional sports activity for its pupils, and the Eton College beagles were recently alleged to have engaged in illegal hare hunting. Perhaps these hares are also vicious predators, and have to be eradicated, despite the fact that hares are endangered?

Reassuringly, however, a spokesman for Eton College states: “We are investigating this allegation as a matter of urgency”.

I wonder if those involved in the working class ‘sport’ of dog fighting in our inner cities were to launch similar investigations into their own alleged crimes, whether they would also be taken seriously. The Hunting Act needs updating, so that those who break the Act receive a prison sentence.

Instead, hunts routinely flout the law, and in the rare instances when sufficient evidence is gathered for a prosecution, the CPS either chooses to ignore it or initiates a prosecution with the intention of dropping the case at the earliest opportunity.

It is then left to the RSPCA to take up the case, whereupon every effort is made to extend the court proceedings inordinately, thereby incurring the RSPCA massive costs.

When such cases result in successful prosecutions, the sentences are derisory, and the hunts continue to function as normal.

Meanwhile, the RSPCA is being demonised on a continual basis in the hope of discouraging it from engaging in such prosecutions in the first place.

M PRITCHARD
Linkside Avenue, Oxford