I AM sorry, indeed, that your correspondent Mr Tony Dunn should seem so upset about what I had written concerning the “sport” of hunting wild animals with trained hounds.

Tony astoundingly asks the question: “Does Peter think that people go hunting in order to be cruel to animals?”

Bearing in mind the more than peripheral part foxes play, rather involuntarily, in attempting not to be torn into bloody chunks of meat by trained assassins, yes, I do rather think that people who go hunting have cruelty to animals in mind.

Mr Dunn calls hunting “one of our great traditional spectacles”. No doubt bear-baiting was colourfully traditional and equally spectacular. I would suggest that this tradition, like bear-baiting, has no part to play in a civilised community.

That the House of Lords spent about two and a half years doing its utmost to stall the prohibition of hunting with dogs simply because it relates to democracy and “national identity” is, I would suggest, rather unlikely.

At the last count, only 24 members of the House of Lords were not signed-up members of that great promoter of fox hunting (indeed the main reason for its existence is to promote its return) the Countryside Alliance.

PETER FOLEY,

Ilford,

Essex.