A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 14th July 1997.

In 1985, the report of a Ministry of Agriculture working party recommended unanimously that the ritual slaughter of cows and sheep should be phased out over a three year period.  The grounds were that the practice inflicted gross suffering on the animals in that they were made to bleed to death from wounds in their throats, in many cases while being suspended upside down.

More recently, animal welfare groups, despairing of getting the Conservative government to act on this report, asked that the packaging of meat from animals slaughtered in this way should at least be marked accordingly so that consumers could choose for themselves.  This request has been repeatedly refused.

I would like to challenge all those, including Labour MPs and the RSPCA, campaigning to ban fox hunting on grounds of cruelty to a few thousand foxes a year to explain why they do not seek to ban the cruelty inflicted on hundreds of thousands of farm animals.