I WAS appalled at your irresponsible cover story about urban foxes (News Shopper, October 1) and mystified as to why your newspaper had suddenly commenced a “great debate” apparently encouraging the persecution of wildlife.

Then the penny dropped. Hunting with hounds is soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history and some reactionary diehards will try every desperate trick in the book to resist the inevitable outlawing of their barbaric “sport”.

The myth urban foxes have started hunting in packs and entering homes to kill our pets, and maybe soon our children too, is both risible and insulting to the intelligence of your readers.

I do not know Janet Richardson. I do not know if she actually saw a fox killing her cat or just assumed a fox had done it.

I do not know if she enjoys fox-hunting and wants it to continue in some form.

I do know I have seen my own ginger cat and the local fox sitting together happily on the grass verge next to my house, mutually unthreatened and unharmed. I know I prefer the evidence of my own eyes to the account of a stranger whose motives I do not trust. I also know cats and children are less at risk of having their lives cut short by foxes than by being flattened by the cars of boy racers tearing up our streets at high speeds with no regard for any species, animal or human, trying to cross the roads.

Urban foxes are scarcely a problem worth worrying about.

Live and let live, I say, and find something more worthy to campaign about.

Julia Hollywood Chaffinch Road Beckenham