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Letters to editor:-
"A Letter from Michael Fish, MBE"
"DEAR
Editor,
December
is a month when
most of us look forward to spending time
with friends and family. However,
the Met Office has predicted a big chill over this Christmas season,
which means a difficult time for the nation's older people. Over
20,000 older people die every year in the UK during the colder
weather so we all need to do our bit to support the older people
living in our towns and villages.
Age
Concerns in your local community are working hard to Fight the
Freeze this year by offering day centres, befriending schemes and
help with heating to keep older people warm and safe. I am
supporting Age Concern's Fight the Freeze campaign which raises
money to keep these vital local services
running.
Your
readers can do
their bit by
holding a fundraising carol night with friends, donating to keep
services running or simply by dropping a friendly note through a
neighbour's door to see if they need a little extra help. I know
that I'll be doing my bit and would ask your readers to spread a bit
of festive cheer this year.
Sincerely,
Michael
Fish, MBE
For
further information log on to www.ageconcern.org.uk/fightthefreeze
or call 020 8765 7624".Our
Christmas Comment...
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Letters
to Editor:- "Birds for Christmas"
"DEAR Editor,
People buying turkeys and other birds for Christmas have for years been aware of and sickened by the intensive farming methods behind battery-raised animals. Thankfully, public awareness has gone some way to eradicating this cruelty - with one exception: game birds.
In the run up to the holiday season, supermarkets across the country are stocking pheasant and partridge products, promoting them as some sort of "wild" or "natural" alternative to factory farmed meat. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A League Against Cruel Sports investigation has revealed the overcrowding and neglect suffered by the tens of millions of pheasants and partridges bred to supply commercial shooting estates. To prevent pecking and cannibalisation, chicks have plastic 'bits' inserted into their nostrils. Their wings are clipped before they are crammed into crates and shipped to commercial estates where wealthy customers will pay thousands of pounds to spend a day blasting game birds out of the sky. To
maximize profits and minimize predation by wildlife, commercial estates snare, trap, shoot and poison millions of mammals and birds of prey every year.
And now the commercial shooting industry wants us to put its waste product - gamebird corpses - on our tables.
Supermarkets owe it to their customers to make it clear that intensively reared gamebirds are neither wild nor natural. If they did, ethical consumers, who buy free range chickens or opt for wild over farmed fish, would say no to this cruelty, too.
Douglas Batchelor, Chief Executive, League Against Cruel Sports"
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