IN your report "Hunt fraternity vow to defy ban" (November 18), Meg Abu Hamdan, a follower of North Yorkshire's Middleton Hunt, vowed to disobey the hunt ban at the first available opportunity, believing it to be an attack on their civil rights.

Also Stephen Rawlings, secretary of the Saltersgate Farmers' Hunt, said members would take the battle to the Law Lords and the European Court Of Human Rights.

Pro-hunt supporters believe those that do not support them or object do so because they are ignorant of the facts.

We and thousands of others are perfectly aware of the facts, as they stand. The objection is to the method of fox control numbers. Better they are shot, a quick and relatively painless death, than being ripped apart by a pack of hounds.

Any argument that this is the best method of controlling fox numbers is made a sick farce by the pomp and ceremony of it all.

They say that it would result in the hounds being destroyed in the event of a ban: they themselves shoot them once they have outlived their usefulness, so the debate over what would be done to thousands of hounds is nonsensical and two-faced.

Fox hunting in general is a barbaric pursuit with no reasonable justification and it has no place in this so-called modern age. It should be consigned to the past along with the attitudes of those who continue to support the unnecessary terrorisation of foxes.

Mr M Taylor and Mrs J Taylor,

Tennent Road,

York.

Updated: 10:24 Tuesday, November 23, 2004