Grouse shooting is brutal animal cruelty, pure and simple – it needs to be banned

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Grouse shooters on a moor in Yorkshire (Alamy)

Having counter-beat grouse away from harm and stood in front of the gun butts with other hunt saboteurs on the Derbyshire moors in the past, the argument to me about grouse shooting is just a plain animal cruelty one.

I was up on those moors again recently with an old hunt saboteur comrade who was showing me a “stink pit” – a huge pit dug into the ground where all the surplus shot birds are thrown to attract the so-called “vermin”, which are then caught by the myriad traps and snares set by the gamekeepers before being killed and thrown into the pit too.

It’s the sport of rich but soulless degenerates, the royal family not least amongst them, and all it does for the lower classes is provide a few jobs for the forelock-tugging lackeys who form the beat lines.

It doesn’t need reviewing. It needs to be banned for the sake of common compassionate decency.

Dave Wetton
Hadlow

Boris Johnson’s crackdown on crime

Boris Johnson is using the age-old Tory diversion tactic of announcing tough crime measures during a period of crisis which has nothing to do with individual criminality and everything to do with political dishonesty and incompetence.

Be that as it may, if he includes investigations into the waste of £43m of public monies on his farcical Garden Bridge vanity project when he was mayor of London and personally signed off a downgrade of conditions for release of public funds – something practical might be achieved.

In the light of Brexit, the french contractors who received £21m for the non-project must be tres heureux.

I presume he kept his illegal water cannons for when law and order breaks down entirely after 31 October?

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

A proposal for the prime minister

A novel idea for Boris Johnson and his turbocharged team: How about having a general election after having funded and delivered all these shiny new plans?!

Sue Breadner
Douglas

The language of Brexit

I suppose “plot”, “rebel” and “secret” adds spice to a story that would otherwise read as:

“Democratically elected lawmakers intent to use their legislative powers to stop an unelected prime minister crashing the country’s economy.”

Paul Armstrong
Workington

Caroline Lucas is right

Your article, Caroline Lucas proposes all-female ‘emergency cabinet’, is timely because academic research on the issue of trading (when it comes to financial markets as opposed to Brexit) suggests men’s overconfidence is a key reason for their failings in such markets.

Whilst allegations of bravado in sealing trade deals have been levelled at the Brexiteers, few have suggested it is a gender issue, let alone with some academic merit. As a former visiting fellow in business, Corpus Christi College Oxford University, I’d like to make that case. As Brad M Barber and Terrance Odean wrote in their paper Boys will be boys: Gender, overconfidence, and common stock investment for the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “We believe there is a simple and powerful explanation for high levels of trading on financial markets: overconfidence…psychologists find that in areas such as finance, men are more overconfident than women.”

Sadly, for Lucas’s argument, more recent academic papers also suggest… well, the title to the paper needs little explanation: Testosterone shifts the balance between sensitivity for punishment and reward in healthy young women. (Psychoneuroendocrinology, Volume 29 Issue 7).

Alpesh Patel
Address supplied

Listen to Hong Kong protesters

I have just spent a very pleasant weekend as a tourist visiting Hong Kong from Singapore, and as I now sit in the transit area of the airport on Monday 12 August, about to leave, I am listening to the tumultuous roar of protestors echoing through from the foyer.

Last night, the brutality of the Hong Kong police force reached new depths. Teargas was thrown in areas such as an underground MTR station where protestors couldn’t escape the potentially deadly fumes, a woman was blinded in one eye by a bean-bag bullet, and protestors were brutally beaten.

Attempts to control protestors through brutal levels of force will only escalate the violence. The cries of the people of Hong Kong must be listened to.

Daniel Emlyn-Jones
Oxford

Power outage preparations

The electrical power outages on Friday 9 August highlights the lamentable amount of contingency planning and the poor resilience of our infrastructure.

It appears that a train stuck without electrical power cannot be rescued. If we have only electric trains with no on-board power store there is nothing to be done but wait (is 13 hours reasonable?).

In the days of steam and diesel, replacement engines could be sent to move the train. But now, unless new engines have battery or hydrogen reserves on board, then being stranded for long periods is inevitable.

Another illustration was the Underground. Has there been any planning or thought given as to what to do in the event of a major power failure? Or is the use of mobile phone torches the official outcome of a secret risk analysis?

Things working as intended is the one instance that does not need much planning. Good systems have most planning done on how to cope with failures.

Ashley Herbert
Huddersfield