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		Letter to the Editor Derby Evening Telegraph - Tuesday 1 October 2002 Dear Sir Thank you for the excellent coverage of the hunting issue in your letters columns (26 & 27/9). I must challenge a couple of the wilder points some of your contributors made. Someone called Roger of the Derby Hunt Saboteurs (he hasn't the courage to give his full name) (letters 27/9) claims that the Countryside March "appeared to be hi-jacked by the bloodsports fraternity". As Iain Duncan Smith has said, you might as well say that a Jumbo Jet had been hi-jacked by British Airways! It is true that a whole range of rural worries coalesced around the March, but the primary point was opposition to the government's proposed hunting ban, and most marchers were either hunters themselves or supported hunting. It was organised by the Countryside Alliance, formerly the British Field Sports Society. How could we hi-jack our own march? This saboteur points out that I underestimated the number of hounds that would be put down in the event of a hunt ban. He says 18,000. My reading of the Burns report says 20,000. But the number put down annually at the end of their working lives is 3000, not his 4,500, which gives an average working life of nearly seven years, not four as he says. Hunt saboteurs may be relaxed about twenty thousand dogs being killed in one go. I'm not. Sandra Barker of Milford (letters 26/9), an "anti" who attended the march, says "We were constantly verbally abused....some of us were spat at and one marcher threw rotten eggs at us". Ms. Barker must have been at a different event. It was the small group of antis who chanted "Scum, scum, scum", faces contorted with hatred. The marchers regarded them with a mixture of bewilderment and astonishment, or ignored them entirely. As the police confirmed publicly, the marchers were astonishingly well behaved. We are proud of the fact that the largest civil rights march in British history took place with no trouble, and scarcely a scrap of litter dropped. Unlike the saboteurs and the antis, the marchers were overwhelmingly decent, law-abiding folk, people who would never have dreamt of taking part in a demonstration until pushed to the limit of their patience by this Labour government's ignorance and contempt. Yours sincerely, Roger Helmer MEP