DR John P Salvatore, Points of view, March 11, asks whether Colin Richey, a previous correspondent, would like to see the badger-baiting laws repealed as well as the hunting ban. This is a cheap hit.

The Hunting Act does not protect wild animals from unnecessary suffering, nor does it promote conservation. It simply tries to prohibit certain methods of wildlife management despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence that they are any less humane than the alternatives.

The most likely impact of the Hunting Act is that more foxes, deer and hares are being killed. This can only be based on anecdotal evidence — Defra Minister Ben Bradshaw stated in the House of Commons in May 2005 that the Government had no plans to evaluate the effects of the Hunting Act and in this matter the Government has been true to its word.

The Countryside Alliance did not invent the "toffs argument" as a side issue. People on both sides of the hunting debate will be surprised at this claim from Dr Salvatore. None more so than Peter Bradley, Private Parliamentary Secretary to Alun Michael at the time, who openly admitted in November 2004 after the ban had been forced into law by use of the Parliament Act that "it was class war".

We do the fox no favours when we put our own sensibilities before its welfare; Dr Salvatore might find the death of a fox by hounds to be an awful spectacle but it is quick and certain; far more so than the slow painful death of an injured or sick animal that might take weeks but happens conveniently out of sight.

The pursuit of prey by predators is a natural phenomenon: it occurs in the wild in the absence of human intervention.

The method by which a pack of hounds hunts is not dissimilar to the method employed by a pack of wolves.

In this sense hunting with hounds differs crucially from other artificial, unnatural methods of population control.

The possibility that a fox might escape being caught by hounds does not reduce the effectiveness of hunting as a method of fox control; rather it makes it a more subtle control method than some others. A healthy animal stands a better chance of escape than one reduced to a living skeleton by mange. Shooting cannot be so discriminating.

The writer and journalist Rupert Issacson is not, as Dr Salvatore describes him, a huntsman. His book The Wild Host might well add something to this debate, but Dr Salvatore's blustering pronouncement that it totally discredits his opponent's argument amounts to no more than name dropping.

Jonathan Higgins

Dartington, Totnes

(by email)