IN reply to the letter from Jan Mountford (Your Letters, June 28) on the subject of hunting and animal rights in which she made several claims against hunting but then failed totally to substantiate any of them, the extraordinary obsession with 'class', that seems central to the anti hunting argument, rears it's ugly head again.

As a manual worker I can assure her that the majority who support hunting and country sports are very ordinary working people. Naturally the truth fails to meet the propaganda needs of the anti-hunting movement. Much better to portray all hunt followers as blood thirsty idle toffs.

The extraordinary claim that hounds are being shot to feed the rest of their pack is a wild accusation that Ms Mountford must either produce clear evidence to prove or retract and publicly and apologise for.

Her remarks about domestic cats merely illustrate a lack of knowledge about this whole matter. Hounds kill about fifteen to twenty thousand foxes a year, and they do so in seconds. Alternatively domestic cats catch millions of protected small birds and mammals every year and then play with, or rather torture them. Perhaps an hour elapses before they are killed.

If any huntsman allowed his hounds to treat a fox in this way he would rightly find himself before a magistrate on cruelty charges.

The arguments put forward against hunting by Jan Mountford are disingenuous, they have both a callous disregard for the livelihood and liberty of the people who live and work in our countryside and contribute nothing to the cause of genuine animal welfare.

Jon Burgess, Worcester Road, Malvern.