Ireland must ban beagling
Sir -- I am delighted to learn that Environment Minister John Gormley has moved to protect Ireland's hare population during the month of March, part of the sensitive breeding season.
In previous years, the country's twenty-two registered beagling clubs, not content with five full months of organised bloodletting, requested and received government approval to pursue their obsessive killing of hares into March.
This meant that breeding females could be legally baited in that month.
Some day, hopefully, the Irish hare will be protected from all forms of cruelty -- the whole year round -- but Minister Gormley's initiative represents an important milestone along the road to abolition.
Beagling is an indefensible and barbaric blood sport. Hares are hounded for miles across country by the packs, followed by gangs of sight-seers and hangers-on, until exhaustion delivers them to the dogs to be torn to pieces.
Male and female hares, young and old, serve as pawns in the beagling game. The object of the exercise is simply to catch and kill them.
Eyes bulge with stark terror and blood seeps into the ground when the packs make contact with their quarry. The dying hares writhe in agony. They scream like babies as the dogs disembowel them -- a sound that once heard is never forgotten.
Surely a powerful indictment of our so-called 'Wildlife Act', drafted and voted into law by a political clique that condoned and supported deliberate cruelty to animals.
John Fitzgerald,
Campaign for the Abolition of Cruel Sports, Callan, Co. Kilkenny
