GILES Bradshaw, Points of View, April 3rd, claims that I suggest that "people be made criminals for taking their dogs into woodland where they might put up a wild mammal". This is a typical hunt supporter's distortion.

Protect Our Wild Animals has drawn up suggested amendments to the Hunting Act 2004, which can be read at the website (www.powa.org.uk). The following amendment would remove the perennial excuse by all hunts caught hunting live quarry that this was an 'accident': "A person commits an offence if, while in charge of a pack of dogs used for the purpose of simulating the hunting of a wild mammal, he causes or permits them to chase, injure or kill a wild mammal of a species which he knows or ought to know is likely to be found and chased, injured or killed by those dogs at that location."

Genuine drag hunts, which have been hunting humanely for many years, are an entirely different matter to "trail hunts", as the fox hunters now smirkingly call themselves. The latter persist in hunting exactly as they always have, foxes being sought, found, chased and killed exactly as before. Just another accident, we are told — every time.

Mr Bradshaw slips into patronising language when he tells me that I "do not seem to understand the countryside is full of wild mammals". I live in the countryside, have three dogs and run a wildlife sanctuary.

Mr Bradshaw's call for a piece of legislation giving a legal definition of deliberate cruelty to wild mammals sounds reasonable — but we have to remember that he is a hunt supporter.

The Wild Mammals Protection Act 1996 already prohibits such acts of cruelty as burning, drowning, crushing and impaling, but in its original form it also banned the setting of dogs onto a wild mammal, which would have banned hunting.

Mr Bradshaw's hunting friends in Parliament made sure that bit was removed before it was allowed to become law.

Suggestions of any such legislation coming from anyone in the hunting fraternity, including David Cameron, will inevitably exempt their own particular form of sadistic and hideous cruelty — that will be the entire point of it, to reassert hunting in what they will see as an unassailable form, so that they may ride roughshod over common decency for as long as they like.

Be on your guard — that is what the Tories would do, to reward their hunting supporters who give so generously of their money and time to see a Conservative government back in place to look after their interests.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

(by email)