YOUR correspondent in last week's Journal, Lewis Potter ("don't criticise something until you know what you are talking about") must have read a different letter to the one I wrote ("myopic minority") as I included no clue in it as to what might specifically qualify me to comment on country pursuits.

Perhaps I should have done so, descended as I am from two generations of gamekeepers and rough shoot owners! At 16 years old, in the 1950s, I was regularly out ferreting with a favourite uncle, whose handy 4.10 shotgun was my fist link to he family tradition.

Even then, despite admiring him greatly, I still had reservations about some of the "sporting tenets" he assumed as a gospel right - he would shoot any cat or hawk he found on his shooting patch, and golden plover were a legitimate sporting target.

You do not need to have had that background however to know that, if it's wrong to tie a tin can to a cat's tail, for a laugh, there is no way anyone can justify, even allowing for freedom and tolerance, that it is right to kill a hare, with dogs for sport?

MICHAEL T PARKER, Main Street, Sedgeberrow.