SIR — I try to be objective and ambivalent, although as an aged countryman I am aware that the badger population is at an extremely high level.

I am, however, concerned at the amount of emotional hype being generated by the anti-cull lobby.

I wonder if Ms Sunningdale (Your Letters September 20) and her friends who patrol the countryside at night in attempts to disrupt the badger cull have ever stopped to consider just what harm they are doing to all our wildlife as they roam in their "high vis" jackets with torches flashing, probably talking loudly?

And this time every year our wildlife is attempting to feed sufficiently to take them through the winter months.

All this activity during the night will inevitably cause the maximum disturbance and stress to all these wild creatures, including owls, dormice, field voles and of course pregnant sow badgers who need to maximise their bodyweight in order to produce the faetus they will be carrying at this time of year.

I wonder, when in the winter and the early spring they find dead or starving wild creatures, will they think that their actions which have contributed to the suffering of these creatures, or will they be at home in their urban fastnesses, oblivious to the suffering going on in darkest Somerset?

Ms Sunningdale does have a point when she refers to the unacceptably low cost of milk in our shops and the pressure on farmers to produce it ever more cheaply to ensure greater profits for the shareholders in the supermarkets.

However, her comment regarding those cattle slaughtered due to many causes, not only those that she mentioned, is of course wide of the mark.

No farmer can possibly afford to keep cattle when they are no longer able to produce or are clearly otherwise unfit for the purpose for which they have been bred.

Farmers cannot afford to be philanthropists and provide homes for geriatric livestock, they are in the business of providing us with the sustenance that we need.

I am not surprised that Ms Sunningdale has met "aggressive shooters".

When one is engaged in an activity such as using a firearm, has taken all the care necessary to place oneself in an appropriate shooting position to provide a safe "backstop" for a bullet, is exercising maximum concentration to ensure a clean, humane kill, only to find some person appearing, either within the danger zone or in such a position as to "spook" the target animal, causing it to move at a critical split-second, thus ensuring a serious chance of a wounded animal escaping, instead of a clean kill, is it surprising that the people employed in the cull get extremely upset?

If Ms Sunningdale and her friends were really confident that this cull would prove to be a failure, their best action would have been to sit back and let it take place.

If then it was shown to be unsuccessful, they would have been able to say "We told you so".

Instead, their actions have now almost guaranteed to ensure that the results, either way, are totally inconclusive. I can therefore only assume that they have not got this confidence.

P J D Donnelly,

Great Meadow,