CAN anyone understand what hunting apologists Jonathan Higgins and Giles Bradshaw are talking about Echo, Tuesday April 14?

Giles Bradshaw tells anyone who will listen (and I'm getting fed up with his rants) that his is the only voice of reason in the hunting debate and he appears to be determined to become a martyr to the cause by openly breaking the Hunting law.

I am sorry to disappoint him but the hunting law was not brought in specifically to curtail the individual actions of a certain Giles Bradshaw of South Molton but to bring to an end the hunting of live quarry with hounds across England and Wales.

Both Mr Bradshaw and Mr Higgins find themselves driven in ever decreasing and confusing circles in their attempts to justify hunting, often contradicting other sections of the hunting fraternity and each other.

One of the common themes of both these gentlemen is that hunting with hounds is nothing more that practiced wildlife management.

John Phelps, in these pages some days ago, exposed the fallacy of this argument in relation to stag hunting, where the quarry was selected and 'harboured' the day before the hunt to ensure a good chase.

In the case of fox hunting, Mr Bradshaw claims only the sick and weak foxes were taken — absolutely ludicrous and he knows it. Hounds were originally bred for stamina, not speed, to provide a good hunt. The whole point was to hunt healthy foxes to the point of exhaustion, where they would be overtaken by hounds, the whole exercise providing good 'sport'.

If the object was quick kills then hounds would have been bred for speed. Pre-ban hunts did not want to see a fox killed quickly as this did not give sport to their subscribers — a fit running fox, on the other hand, provided good sport.

Now for Mr Higgins. Never did I ever imagine that anyone would dare to defend otter hunting on the grounds that it conserved otters but step forward Mr Higgins, Echo, Tuesday April 14.

Oh how he loves the opportunity to jump on the green bandwagon. He says that when otters were in decline, the hunts become conservationists, afraid, of course, that they wouldn't have any otters left to kill.

When otter hunting was banned in the early 1980s, there was an opportunity for the otter hunts to stand back and let the creature recover in numbers. Instead, the hunts continued rebranded as mink hunts and bring their own brand of mayhem to the river banks. This makes the re-establishment of the otter, a sensitive creature which reacts badly to disturbance, that much more parlous.

Mr Higgins' other bizarre and convoluted argument appears to suggest that the hunting correspondent of Country Illustrated Magazine, Rupert Issacson, doesn't know what he is talking about because he is not a professional huntsman. So even the hunting fraternity cannot agree among themselves with huntsmen and hunting commentators now in disagreement about the purpose of hunting with hounds before it became criminalised.

I find the continued bleatings of Messers Higgins and Bradshaw reprehensible.

They both wish to see a return to wild animals being killed for sport but they are not honest enough to say so. Instead they try to pull the wool over our eyes with this contrived nonsense about management when centuries of evidence and hunting reports demonstrate what we all know — that hunting with hounds is nothing more than bloodsports.

Dr John Salvatore

Clyst Heath

Exeter

(by email)