A very good article by Dan Needles on the Farmers Forum here.

One of the things that the animal-rights lobby consistently fail to understand is that with the privilege of being the temporary custodian of parts of our Countryside comes great responsibility - namely the responsibility to take the tough decisions that are necessary to pass on environments and ecosystems that are as viable as they were before you took on that custodianship.

They refuse to recognise - and shame on them for it - that by interfering, sometimes illegally and sometimes legislatively, in the way that the current custodians of the land manage it, they are forcibly taking onto themselves the moral responsibility to try to ensure that it is managed better thereafter.

Regardless of what it is that is being "managed", be it an environment, a company or any other endeavour, if you decide that you need to remove the current management, because you think that they are doing the job badly, then that is only half of the job. Having removed the existing management, you then need not just to put in place a new management, but to put in place a new management that will achieve better results than the one you have removed.

Even if your claim is that the endeavour needs no ongoing management, you still need to put in place systems to monitor that your policy of "no management" is achieving the right results and therefore enable you to make changes if it is not.

This is where the animal-rights lobby consistently falls down. They are ever so pleased to say what they think other people are doing wrong, but they remain resolutely silent about what should be done instead, let alone coming up with the money and man-power to do it themselves.

Hunting with dogs is a perfect case in point. Anti-hunters wax lyrical about what they consider to be the evils of hunting with dogs, but when you ask them which method of species control farmers and land-managers should use instead, they fall strangely quiet.

You would have thought that if the anti-hunters were truly concerned about the welfare of the hunted quarry species then, 15 years after the imposition of the Hunting Act, they would be concerned about whether the lot of those species, and the ecosystems of which they form part, had truly improved.

Because, if, as is entirely possible, some or all of those species and ecosystems have suffered as a result in the change of management then the responsibility for that detriment lies squarely at the feet of the anti-hunters.

But what do we hear from them on this subject? Nothing. Will they step up to the plate and accept that responsibility or investigate it? Do they even care? No.

And that is precisely why they are not fit to be allowed to make such changes...