Good reasons in favour of hare coursing

John Fitzgerald (Letters, Mar 4) complained that there was no excuse for hare coursing.

Scientific studies have shown that in areas where coursing clubs operate, the Irish hare population levels are between ten and one hundred times higher than in comparable areas where coursing clubs do not operate.

The studies put this down to better feeding of the hares in captivity, control of their natural predators, better veterinary care, all allowing them an advantage when returned to the wild.

These studies also videotaped coursing meets and found that when analysing thousands of directly observed runs, mortality occurred in 1.9% of those runs, not the inaccurate and misleading non-figure of “many” that John Fitzgerald quotes.

And while the most recent figures are unpublished as yet, it appears that number has fallen to under 1%.

I neither hunt nor course, but even I can accept the continued survival and thriving of the Irish hare — a species recently listed as having a conservation status of “poor” by the NWPS — is proven scientifically to be better served by coursing than by the protests of a small handful of animal rights extremists who have neither the manpower nor the funding to do as much actual work for the hare species as coursing does.

The studies all strongly indicate that were we to ban coursing out of sorrow for an individual hare who died as a result of it, we would soon after feel far more sorrow as the species died out.

These are not “excuses” for coursing; these are darn good reasons for it.

Mark Dennehy

Stepaside

Co Dublin