IT IS with some confusion that I write in reply to Emily Chadwick's letter (Citizen, last week) saying the labelling of shot game as free range is a lie concocted by the shooting community.

If birds are released into the wild, fed in the wild and shot in the wild, how much more free range is it possible to be?

We also need to question the singling out of game birds in the letter. There are many travesties of animal welfare committed by both food and cosmetics industries, so why deem a pheasant shot humanely after a life in the wild more in need of our protection than a rabbit tortured for weeks on end by a make-up company?

The answer is less to do with animal welfare and more to do with bad politics. The new drive of the anti-fieldsports bodies, having done away with hunting, is to equate shooting with intensive battery farming. After all, who would support battery farming? Certainly not anyone in the shooting community.

I am sure that Adolf Hitler - who, we must remember, banned hunting almost as soon as he came to power - would greatly approve of this insidious method of deceiving a well-meaning but not too clued-up public and slowly eradicating chosen minorities one by one.

Peter Houghton, Heysham.