TODAY it is Hallowe'en and this year it coincides with the official start of the hunting season — possibly the last under the current ban. This is where the spectre of redcoats, riders, terrier-men and hunt followers bear down on the poor foxes to put them to their cruel barbaric death from a pack of pursuing hounds.

This activity is a relic from the past and, as we've moved into more civilised and enlightened times, fox hunters have had to increasingly demonise the fox. This is largely by grossly exaggerating its predations on livestock and to purport to be 'pest-controllers', to try to justify their 'sport'. This has also meant that hunters needed to team up with terrier-men whose primary interest is in badger culling and fox-baiting at dig-outs and killing.

Now, after over four years with the hunting ban in place, Tim Bonner, communications director of the Countryside Alliance has stated on the BBC's Radio 4 Today programme that it has tested the Hunting Act and tested it to destruction.

So it seems that with money in your pocket any law can be modified or destroyed as long as you just need to be able to afford the lawyers' costs.

This indicates how arrogant, selfish and powerful the hunting fraternity still is. Tory leader David Cameron plans to reward it by repeal when what the public really wants is a ban that works and which will be properly enforced by an unbiased police force.

We can now see where the true loyalties with this new countryside Conservative Party lie, with mounted hunters taking the role of the cavalry and the supporters and followers forming the foot-solders.

They are marshalled under the banner of VoteOK, all working their socks off to get anti-hunt Labour and Lib Dem MPs out of office in their marginal seats and a new shiny pro-hunt Tory in their place. This is democracy, Jim, but not as we know it.

Strengthening the Hunting Act is what is required after the General Election — that's what the vast majority want. Otherwise, with the police currently doing nothing regarding the policing of this small minority rural group, it will be the rural dwellers that will feel the full force of legalised hunting back in the countryside as the hunters take full control for their cruel 'sporting' activities.

They will do this with all of today's high-tech equipment, including mobile phones with in-built GPS, topology mapping with satnav facilities, group communications, short-wave radios and ranging-finding binoculars. All this amassed against the poor diminutive fox and they still call it 'hunting' Jim, but not as we know it. It's the modern-day equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

The late Tony Banks always said that the way we treat animals serves as a reference point in our society and where we are on the moral plane.

At the base of the hunting debate is the very simple issue of whether or not it is reasonable for someone to be cruel to an animal for their own entertainment or for the entertainment of others? The issue for all of us is that simple.

Cruelty to animals for sport, or entertainment, is now, and should always remain, a crime.

Graham Forsyth

Fairway Rise, Chard