I expect leaders of the Countryside Alliance to support the use of snares and traps to kill animals, but I am surprised a professor in animal health, Roy Brown, should defend such instruments (D&S Times, Oct 23).

All British animal welfare societies condemn snares and I have found foxes dead in snares that have crushed their stomachs to a diameter of less than two inches with the surrounding trashed vegetation showing signs of their desperate hours of struggle to escape the steel noose before until ended their agony.

The most recent experiments conducted by the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on the 'humaneness of snares' began with the extraordinary discovery that all snares sold in the UK did not comply with Defra's code of practice.

A report produced in October this year, by land reform expert Andy Wightman and international conservation expert Dr Ruth Turgay on he intensification of grouse moor management in Scotland reported that wealthy grouse moor owners are ruining large areas of countryside and being paid by tax-payers to do so.

They stated that the annual burning of heather was reducing biodiversity and releasing carbon into the atmosphere, that mountain hares, crows, foxes and stoats were 'wiped out on an industrial scale' and endangered birds of prey were persecuted.

They claimed that sheep were being used as 'tick mops' to attract ticks away from grouse, that medicines were spread around the moor to reduce disease in grouse, and that the moors were littered with snares and traps that 'wound and maim indiscriminately'.

Adrian Blackmore of the Countryside Alliance, says that my description of bird shooters as 'gun crazy psychopaths' is absurd. All I know is that anyone who pays thousands of pounds for the fun of firing lead pellets into small birds that have never done them any harm, cannot be exactly sympathetic to their victims. On occasions I have had to shoot badly injured wild animals to put them out of their misery. How anyone can get pleasure from destroying life is beyond me.

John Bryant, wildlife consultant, Kent