Open letter from Hunt Saboteurs Association

HSA news release 5th September 2006

When the ‘truth’ is found to be lies… An open letter from Hunt Saboteurs Association

To put the record straight (as very few journalists have bothered to ask for our comment on the seemingly endless recycling of an alleged attack on anglers in the North-West), the Hunt Saboteurs Association (HSA) has ALWAYS considered angling to be a bloodsport.

There is no ‘new campaign’ against angling – it remains an abhorrent and cruel activity, and as such will continue to be included within our remit as an organisation against ALL bloodsports. Our website (www. huntsabs. org. uk) includes details on how to sabotage angling, and this information has been present in our Tactics Handbook for well over a decade. The HSA itself has been around for over 40 years, and has played a major part in securing a ban on hunting with hounds by using non-violent, direct action tactics.

Now call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, but something tells me this whole media frenzy is highly likely to be orchestrated by an increasingly desperate PR (and membership!) team at the Countryside Alliance. Ultimately they have nothing to lose, and seemingly everything to gain (especially new members) by trying to push the ‘angling is the next target’ angle within the angling community. The hunt ban erradicated the CA’s primary reason for existance, and so now they scrabble around trying to rally others to their already lost cause. You’d be a fool to fall for it.

Of course we’ll never agree on the issue of angling – it remains a cruel and unnecessary pastime. It’s not about ‘people-hating’, it’s not about ‘class hatred’ and it’s not about ‘terrorism’. It’s about cruelty – plain and simple. If you want to spend an afternoon by the riverbank then by all means do, just take a good book, or maybe a bin bag and gloves so you can clean a bit of our countryside up for others to enjoy. Leave the hooking of a fish out of the equation, and we’ll gladly leave you alone.

Yours sincerely Dawn

Dawn Preston Press Officer

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