A chara, - John Tierney of the Association of Hunt Saboteurs (July 17th), makes some very serious and wildly inaccurate allegations about the shooting community in this country. I would like to take issue with him on several points.
He accuses the shooting community of being responsible for the extinction of the Golden Eagle at the beginning of the last century. While it is true the gamekeepers working on the English-owned estates of that era shot eagles as vermin, the sheep farming community was responsible for much of the extermination that took place. They did this by shooting, poisoning and nest destruction in the mistaken belief that the birds posed a threat to their livestock and therefore their livelihoods.
To blame the shooting community as a whole, such as it existed at that time, shows a lack of knowledge on the subject by Mr Tierney. He then claims that Irish gun owners operate on the motto "if it flies it dies" and that our bird identification skills are lacking. The truth is the vast majority of us go to considerable effort to ensure that we act within the law and only hunt legitimate quarry species as laid down by the 1976 Wildlife Act and more recently the EU Birds Directive.
The shooting community is like any other large group of people and there are a few individuals whose disregard for the law reflects badly upon us all. However, is it fair for people like Mr Tierney to tar us all with the same brush? Does he believe all motorists to be reckless criminals just because a few drive under the influence? His calling shotguns a "blind mans weapon" used to "blast wildlife into oblivion" demonstrates a complete ignorance of said weapons. His impression of a shotgun is of the sort gleaned from too much Hollywood style violence on TV.
If, as Mr Tierney asserts, we gun owners pose a serious threat to the return of the Golden Eagle, how does he explain the return from near extinction of other Raptor species such as the Peregrine Falcon and the Buzzard? Their comeback did not require the introduction of the Draconian measures he suggests being inflicted upon law-abiding people.
Finally, I note that Mr Tierney has adopted the tactic used by anti-gun lobbies in the US and Britain of using words such as "gunman" when describing gun owners. This conjures up images of masked raiders, criminals and terrorists in the mind of the reader, creating a negative impression of people who own legally held firearms.
Mr Tierney's ill-informed attack on the shooting community does him no credit and may even harm the cause he purports to represent. - Is mise le meas,
Cian Merne. Bray, Co Wicklow.