SIR — Oh to be in Withycombe now that the shooting season is over for pheasants.
I have lived and worked in the countryside most of my life but never encountered as much shooting as close to me and general harassment of wildlife as here.
I know this is worsened by much shooting that takes place at Luxborough by the syndicate there, which we can hear well.
Who are these people who derive so much pleasure from killing? Do they realise how badly it affects many people who hear this?
Haven't we evolved at all from the hunter/gatherers we used to be?
Guns with silencers are also used very close to our property, which I find most un-nerving, and pheasants are shot out of season this way.
Many people gain great pleasure from the occasional sighting of a fox and feel privileged to live alongside badgers.
Both these animals are much maligned. The fox has the reputation for taking livestock but my opinion and experience it is poor supervision of livestock that allows this to happen, the fox being an opportunist.
Why not leave him to reduce the rabbit population which he is a master at?
If the fox hunters enjoy the exhilarating chase across the countryside why can't they drag hunt, as in Germany, instead of chasing an animal to exhaustion?
It has yet to be proven that the badger is totally responsible for the spread of bovine TB. There are many factors involved here, one of which is the intensive way cattle are kept today and the lack of natural herbs in their diet.
Milking cattle in particular are kept in very stressful conditions, several hundred in one herd. It's a wonder their immune system functions at all.
Badgers can also be unhealthy because of the stressful conditions we force upon them. We need healthier cattle and healthier badgers.
When I was in farming this worked well, badgers lived alongside cattle without a problem.
It would be so good to see greater respect for the animal life around us.
The animal kingdom doesn't in any way cause the damage to us that we do to it.
We shoot them, run them over, remove their habitat and food, trap them, poison them, eat them, experiment on them and use them for leisure, entertainment and wear them.
They owe us nothing, don't we owe them an awful lot?
They cause no damage to the environment, or very little, and were on this planet long before we were. Hence we are in their space, not they in ours.
This is worth remembering by those who would like to exterminate certain species.
In conclusion, I would like to say that many of us are really disturbed and upset by seeing, and hearing, shooting and hunting, realising that the birds and animals that we have become familiar with and quite fond of will not be returning to our gardens.
To see piles of hundreds of discarded rotting pheasants in the countryside is also upsetting and raises many issues about the ethics of rearing thousands of birds, using valuable resources in a time of increasing demands upon the planet.
Although clay pigeon shooting doesn't encourange the land owner to be such a conservationist, it can be a very competitve sport, less demanding on resources and most importantly of all, no cruelty is involved.
It would be so wonderful if the shooters and hunters who enjoy their country sports could become more caring, aware of the suffering they cause and use the perfectly adequate alternatives available.
Meg Sunningdale,
Withycombe.