Unacceptable face of country sport

THE revelation that animal cruelty in the form of hare-coursing has ‘returned’ to the Old Course at St Andrews (News, April 3) is probably no revelation at all. The horrific picture of a greyhound inches from a clearly terrified hare, running at full tilt across a field, which accompanied the article, will no doubt have caused many readers to wince.

The sad fact is that wildlife crime of one sort or another persists in the countryside and will never stop while there are human beasts out there with cruelty ingrained in their nature, ready to engage in such activities.

Their subterfuge knows no bounds when it comes to ingenuity for maintaining secrecy and hiding their ‘sport’ from the police. Those who are more familiar with such pursuits will know that the people who participate in them are well organised and adept at evading capture.

As well as hare coursing, the equally barbaric practice of badger baiting continues in many areas undetected. It is conducted at night and the only evidence that it has taken place will be a dead badger, torn to bits by terriers and possibly clubbed over the head with a spade to finish it off. The perpetrators will have long disappeared from the scene.

They are the kind of people who have little compassion for anything wild and are happy, also, to participate in such pursuits as dogfighting and cockfighting. We rarely hear about these nefarious, medieval practices other than in the occasional TV documentary from someone who has gone under cover and infiltrated a gang.

The biggest obstacle to any form of deterrence or eradication is the meagre penalties handed out by the courts to those who are sometimes caught and appear in the dock. Gathering the evidence to put them there in the first place is hard enough, as the police will tell you.

We can only hope that the Old Course can be returned to the sole purpose for which it was designed and that if hare coursing has been taking place, the perpetrators are caught and penalised in the strongest possible way.

I know what I’d do with them. Let them be lined up on the edge of a field, a starting pistol fired, and get them running as fast as they can while a pack of angry Rottweilers is released to chase after them. Maybe then they’d know how the hare feels.

Gilbert Foster, Peebles