Letter: ​Hunting ban has failed to improve wild animal welfare - undoubtedly, suffering has increased

It seems that there is no willingness on the part of anti-hunting groups to learn or understand what the impact of the Hunting Act in England and Wales has been on the animals involved.

The various groups opposed to hunting, while spending literally millions of pounds in support of this legislation, have not spent a single penny in assessing its consequences.

A two-year investigation recently published in the book Rural Wrongs: Hunting and the Unintended Consequences of Bad Law by environmental journalist Charlie Pye-Smith shows that life for the fox and hare has been made considerably worse.

Their status has been reduced to that of pests and are now killed by different methods for other reasons and in far greater numbers, all unseen by the public. Undoubtedly, suffering has increased not diminished under this law.

The simple fact is: the hunting ban has failed to improve wild animal welfare. John Blair and other senior Alliance Party members have been given the results of this investigation, so it will be interesting to see how they will now proceed and on what basis they justify a new law.

We know full well that there are numerous motives and prejudices involved when it comes to opposing hunting and these combined to convince the then Labour government at Westminster to pass the Hunting Act in 2004 – something Tony Blair, the Prime Minister at the time, now regrets.

Those prejudices no doubt exist in Northern Ireland as well, but it is now clear that any similar move to ban hunting with hounds cannot pretend that this proposed legislation is for animal welfare reasons.

Jim Barrington, London