Mink question adds to the debate over hunting

ERIC Beechey (Yorkshire Post, January 11) missed the point about hunting. In my previous letter I had taken for granted (who wouldn’t?) that those who hunted found pleasure in this.

Mr Beechey only quoted the beginning of a sentence. What the whole paragraph did was to infer that if there were two ways of culling foxes with similar considerations of efficiency and humanity, one way without pleasure and the other with an element of pleasure, it is only sensible to take the pleasurable.

Full marks to Mr Beechey, however, for correcting my impression of Lorraine Platt – I wrongly assumed she was a “townie”, ignorant of such rural affairs as predator and prey. I see both Lorraine Platt and Eric Beechey were trustees of the League Against Cruel Sports, so presumably they want to preserve our native wildlife.

Possibly their League took part in the liberation of the alien mink from fur farms.

These mink are now slaughtering our native wildlife, endangering their survival. As the cost of culling these mink is beyond the capacity of landowners, do Mr Beechey and Ms Platt accept their League’s responsibility for the huge and ongoing damage to the wildlife element of our environment, and agree that the League should pay for the cost of culling?

From: Phyllis Capstick, Hellifield, Skipton, North Yorkshire.

I AGREE with Eric Beechey (Yorkshire Post, January 11) 
when he states in his letter: “The idea of killing animals 
for pleasure is repulsive to 
almost the whole of the population.”

Yet foxes, themselves, kill for pleasure so by the same token, does he regard them as repulsive animals?