I NOTE with some amusement a new tack in the arguments made against hunting on your letters pages. I assume this is down to the League Against Cruel Sports' recent announcement that it opposes plans for the banning of all wilful cruelty to wild mammals.

From recent letters from John Phelps and an anonymous correspondent it seems that the law was not about cruelty, but... traffic congestion.

Mr Phelps suggests the purpose of the law was to repeal a law allowing hunts to take hounds on to roads. This seems a strange claim, as the text of the act has a section detailing what laws it repeals and it mentions nothing of it. I can only assume it is in invisible ink.

Your anonymous correspondent asks: "Haven't we all been held up by the hunts and their followers blocking the roads and lanes?" I'm casting my mind back to all the many times I have been held up in my car. Were those three hours stuck dying for a pee on the M5 in fact caused by the Gordano Harriers or the Sedgemoor Staghounds meeting at junction 27?

It seems some drivers have a culture of blaming everybody else for their traffic woes. As a cyclist I have often had a driver impatiently gunning his engine behind me, passing me far too close and then joining a queue 100 yards or so up the road. It's not other road users that cause 99.99 per cent of our traffic congestion, not hunts, horses dogs or cyclists; it's cars.

Giles Bradshaw

Rose Ash