• LETTER TO EDITOR
We are delighted that Peterborough City Council has banned hunts from their lands and that other Councils are looking at this. We are obviously also very pleased that a number of major landowners have suspended trail hunt licences pending the results of the police investigation into the leaked webinars.
However, the police investigation is NOT into whether illegal hunting has taken place but into whether any laws were broken in the webinars themselves. Obviously we will be delighted if the investigation finds this to be the case and prosecutions result but we fear that it will be very difficult for the police to make anything ‘stick’ in this respect.
The hunts will then gleefully try to make political capital out of this and try to claim they have been exonerated but it is imperative that the public do not lose sight of the main issue here – namely that the webinar presenters confirmed what we have been saying since the ban was introduced, that trail hunting is a cover for illegal hunting. We cannot let the fact that an investigation is taking place detract from this key point.
Now that the hunts themselves have confirmed that trail hunting is a smokescreen for illegal hunting, landowners have no excuse and must now permanently ban the hunts from their land. They need to know that if they continue to allow trail-hunting on their land they will be complicit in illegal hunting. They can no longer claim ignorance and hid behind platitudes.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected]
Yours
Dr Paul M Hildreth
Action Against Foxhunting
www.actionagainstfoxhunting.org
