Sir, - I wish to compliment the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Walsh, on his recent statement in support of fox-hunting and field sports in general. Unlike a lot of politicians, he made no effort to pander to the vocal minority of the animal rights movement. His honesty and good sense deserve support.
Mr Walsh came in for criticism from the usual few scribes and from that great bastion of agricultural knowledge, RTE. I doubt if many of them would know to which end of the bullock one would feed the hay. Yet they have no difficulty in demanding we don't kill foxes and attempting to foist their own ill-informed views on vermin control on everyone else. I wonder how these people would feel if a bunch of farmers from Co Limerick organised a campaign demanding that the people of Montrose and Foxrock desist from all forms of vermin control and allow an unhindered increase in the population of rats, mice, foxes, grey crows and magpies. Rats and magpies in RTE - what an appropriate habitat. The lives of millions of rats and mice that are poisoned every year in our cities could be saved by these well-intentioned people. If they want to save the lives of little creatures let them start on their own doorsteps.
But now to the nub of the matter. On David Hanly's programme on RTE a discussion took place between an ISPCA representative, Mr Ciaran O'Donovan, and a representative of the fox-hunting fraternity. The ISPCA is a respected organisation that has recently been infiltrated, but not fully taken over, by extreme animal rights activists. They walked in step for a couple of years on issues such as cattle exports, fox-hunting and shooting. The cracks in the courtship appeared on the issue of putting down stray dogs. The animal rights people were unwilling to look after the dogs but still objected to them being put down.
Mr O'Donovan's acceptance during the discussion that foxes must be killed is both laudable and sensible and a further distancing of himself from the extremists. Last year in Ireland there were 30,000 foxes shot and 25,000 killed by hounds. Mr O'Donovan's assertion that all of these should be accounted for by an expert marksman makes his stance against fox-hunting unsustainable.
The 30,000 foxes that were shot were all shot by the best marksmen in the country. But before the marksmen could get a shot at them they had to be driven from cover using terriers and hounds. So we're back to fox-hunting (the very thing he is condemning), only done according to Mr O'Donovan's methods, i.e. with the fox being killed by gun rather than by hound. This has a number of disadvantages.
Firstly, it is unindiscriminate method of culling, as there is no selection of the unhealthy and the weak. (However, this method must be maintained as it kills such a huge number of foxes.) The second disadvantage of the gun is that a number of foxes will be wounded and take hours or even days to die. When culling with hounds, there are only two types of foxes: dead ones and live ones.
Those of us who farm and maintain rural Ireland and who understand the balance of nature are quite happy to explain these things to those who don't understand them. - Yours, etc., JOHN HOURIGAN,
Murroe, Co Limerick.