Re hunting, I'm kind of surprised to see the posts saying "go bow-hunting or use a muzzle-loader, it's more ethical because it takes more skill". Either you are hunting strictly for food, or you aren't. If you are hunting strictly for food, you use the most expedient solution which will usually be a shotgun with a damn great slug, a rifle with telescopic sights, or similar. Shoot it and be done. But if you're hunting with a bow or some other archaic weapon, please don't be under any illusion that you're killing the animal for sport in the same way as any English fox-hunter.

As far as pheasant and grouse shooting goes, the birds *do* get eaten. Yes it's hunting for sport, but only in the same way as anyone today hunts or fishes when you can buy meat from the store.

There's additional issues with fox-hunting in that there's no natural predators for them apart from cars. The question is not whether we should kill them, but only how. If not with dogs, we'll need people with guns to go out and shoot them. Choose your method. So long as land is farmed, foxes will be a pest and their numbers must be artificially reduced.

Incidentally, I believe some fox-hunting groups are moving onto mink hunting. Mink escaped from farms and now have colonised almost all rivers in Britain. They are genuine pests in Britain, as a single mink can kill all wildlife for several miles around it and they have no natural controls. For an example from the recent New Scientist, there were two studies of water vole populations in the 1990's, and between the first study and the second study the mink had wiped out 90% of the British water vole population. Absolutely no-one cares about hunting mink (as far as I can tell), and rightly so.

Similarly rabbits can cause huge damage to crops, even more so in areas where they have no real predators. They're eminently shootable.

Graham.