Sir, – Your correspondent Anne Strahan (December 31st) cannot get her head around John Fitzgerald's problem with foxhunting (December 29th). I suspect that the vast majority of people, by the same token, cannot get their heads around the fact that some human beings think it's okay to hound and kill wild animals for "sport", even if they do, as she says, "clean their horses and dress themselves appropriately".
She says that the fox is a pest that kills lambs and chickens, and that hounds are behaving naturally in pursuing them and tearing them apart, but in fact they are trained by the hunters to hunt and kill as a pack, and are “blooded” during the cub-hunting season on young and inexperienced fox cubs.
Statistics available on fox predation belie claims by hunters that the fox is a pest. A pilot study undertaken by the Department of Agriculture’s veterinary lab (1992) showed predation (including all kinds of predators) and misadventure (accidents, drownings, etc) combined accounted for 5 per cent of all lamb mortalities, while the British ministry of agriculture found much the same, citing predation at a mere 1 per cent, adding that it did not consider foxes to be a significant factor in lamb mortality.
Meanwhile, eminent zoologistDr James Fairley (NUI Galway), author of An Irish Beast Book, states: "A great deal of the many allegations of lamb killing are based on insufficient or even non-existent evidence. When interviewing farmers, I found that in some cases, a dead, unwounded animal or the mere disappearance of a lamb were attributed to the work of the fox."
The fox is under constant persecution, much of it utterly cruel and barbaric, based on scant or little evidence of its threat to farm livestock, as the statistics show, but like every myth, it continues to be perpetuated, mostly by recreational hunters in whose interest it is to demonise the fox. Foxhunting has been outlawed for the past 10 years by our neighbours in England, Scotland and Wales, while hare coursing has also been banned in these jurisdictions and in Northern Ireland, leaving Ireland as a last outpost for barbarism, thanks to successive governments that have consistently turned a blind eye to the cruelty. – Yours, etc,
AIDEEN YOURELL,
Irish Council Against
Blood Sports,
PO Box 88,
Mullingar, Co Westmeath.