It wouldn't be half so bad if these "huntsmen," with their fine livery, silly noises, expensively-maintained horses and huge packs of uneconomical baying dogs just admitted what we all already know - that they are doing it for fun and that the very last thing they want is for foxes to be eradicated. A chap with a shotgun (the bloke we have round here is a true countryman called Carl, a great bloke who really understands what farmers need by way of protection for their livestock and crops) is a hundred times more economical. Carl is out just for foxes threatening the free-range chickens and for the very damaging herds of roe deer we have round here (the buggers go for my brassicas too). In fact, just get into your Landrover and drive round the country lanes a bit too fast and you'll kill many more foxes than the twats in red who blood the foreheads of groomed young boys on their first hunt. The most amusing thing I've seen for years was the hunt last year, galloping away manically on the far side of the first forty-acre field between me and Widemouth Bay, while a magnificent dog fox, a couple of hundred yards away from them in the same field, just below my garden, was ambling around insouciantly, glancing at the brainless idiots across the field with the nearest thing to a disdainful foxy look you could conjure in your mind's eye. I definitely sided with the fox!