WITH REFERENCE to Joan Smith's article on the Queen Mother, "Queen Bee with a very nasty sting" (11 July), my mother at 95 years, coming from a working background, had the same attitude as the Queen Mother. She is quite wrong: we do not see the hunting fraternity as toffs - we see them as barbarians.PETER ALLENWorthing, West Sussex. He would make communists of us all. Baroness Mallalieu dismisses hunt opponents as being motivated by class. Hardly a fair description of the 70 per cent of the electorate who wish to see hunting outlawed, not to mention his own shadow Home Secretary, Ann Widdecombe. William Hague even stoops to insults by claiming that Tony Blair's proposal to take positive action on this issue is a sop to the far left of the Labour Party. THE DIRTY tricks plan to rig opinion polls is typical of those who support the discredited bloodsport of hunting ("Pro-hunting lobby in ploy to fix polls", July 11). Timed and dated videos could be filmed along the lines of shop security videos for inspectors to view.Unless such measures are taken, there will continue to be a difference between the rules and the actual practice behind closed doors.C WELLSRuislip, Middlesex.
At present there are only a handful of government inspectors to cover tens of thousands of experiments. This showed puppies being hit hard by the young men working with them and some of the puppies bleeding from frequent injections. RSPCA and other inspectors should make frequent surprise visits to these establishments. Channel 4 viewers were shocked at the Countryside Undercover - It's a Dog's Life programme a couple of years ago which included secret video footage. The "stringent controls" he writes of are often not adhered to behind closed doors. GEORGE HOWARTH of the Home Office expressed surprise (Letters, 11 July) at the report on the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection's video which showed GM pigs kept in appalling laboratory conditions ("Video shows `human' gene pigs in lab", 4 July).
The legacy of this is bequeathed to our babies through what should be the most wholesome food of all.TONY WARDLEViva! (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals)Brighton, East Sussex. There are now so many animals needing to be fed that virtually all agriculture has intensified to meet their demands.More than a million gallons of pesticide are sprayed on the land every year, together with petroleum-based fertilisers and a cocktail of other chemicals and poisons. The reason is the extraordinary amount of vegetation that animals consume - up to 16 kilos of vegetable protein to produce one kilo of meat protein. But they also discovered that the breast milk of vegetarian mothers was only one to two per cent as polluted as that of the general population. Your Sunday roast contains 14 times as many residues as the potatoes and parsnips which surround it, according to the British Medical Association.
US researchers (New England Journal of Medicine) listed toxic chemicals found in breast milk, and it was extremely disturbing. As far back as 1981 it was known that the milk of vegetarian mothers carried fewer pollutants - particularly pesticide residues, arsenic, lead and other undesirables found in meat and dairy products. MOTHERS WORRIED about contaminants in their breast milk ("More than 350 pollutants found in breast milk", 11 July) can do something very positive about it: stop eating meat and preferably dairy products too. Why can't Joan Smith bring herself to do the same?OZDEM SANBERKTurkish AmbassadorLondon SW1.