Philip Toledo (‘I eat all the birds I hunt’, March 31), to the great amusement of most thinking individuals, went out of his way to justify the hunting he does in spring by claiming to eat anything he manages to kill.

What he does not seem to realise is that what he does with his kill, after he’s killed it, is irrelevant. He may eat it, burn it, sell it or leave it to rot – the fact is that he should not have killed it at that time, to begin with.

It is the act of killing breeding birds needlessly that is the problem, regardless of what is done with them later.

Additionally, his sadly disingenuous argument attempts to mask the truth that he does not kill in order to eat but, rather, he kills for the sheer pleasure of it.

The eating is a secondary option, the fact remaining that, even if he did not like to eat them, he would probably have killed them, in any case.

I will go further still and challenge him to rebut my accusation that he would shoot these birds even if they were poisonous and, furthermore, he wouldhappily shoot on any and every flying thing that came within his sights, were it not for the laws that forbade this, regardless of how he chose to dispose of the carcasses later.