Factory farming, George Bush and others

Shocking lesson from Poland on dangers of factory farming

Sir: I was shocked and saddened to read of the American hog factories being established in Poland, apparently with EU money(report, 18 November). I thought we had recognised pigs as sentient beings capable of suffering. They are also intelligent. To keep these animals in the conditions described is wrong, and as the article makes clear it is not only the animals who suffer.

We don't need to genetically engineer pigs when we have hundreds of years of experience breeding them. Their waste would not pollute with "a cocktail of up to 400 dangerous substances including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and dozens of disease-causing viruses and microbes" if they were humanely reared and fed a natural diet.

As a tax-payer I would prefer any money from the EU was used to support traditional farming communities and family farms in Poland and elsewhere in the EU, including here in Britain. To rear animals humanely is expensive and labour-intensive but it is environmentally sound, encourages employment in the countryside, enables communities to thrive and importantly produces meat which is good.

What is happening in Poland is nightmarish, but as consumers we have to recognise that factory farming on any scale happens because so many people are prepared to buy cheap meat in sanitising plastic, without caring how it was produced. We should care.

YVETTE KAHANE
Melksham, Wiltshire

Save the world from Bush

Sir: I am an 82-year-old American World War II veteran (stationed near Norwich till my plane was shot down in 1943), with a message for the UK: not since the Battle of Britain have millions of Americans looked for the Brits to save the world from threatened disaster.

President Bush, with his doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive war and his direct line to Jesus Christ feels he is divinely ordained to save the world from evil - and he is confident that he can detect good from evil even though other countries cannot. His "moral clarity" and his impatience with nuance pose the danger foreseen by André Gide when he said, "Tyranny is the absence of complexity."

The President has said that he does not read newspapers, relying instead on the "objective" briefings from Condi Rice and others to keep abreast of current events. He does not know that 60 per cent of the British public think he is a threat to world peace or that 53 per cent of the citizens of the European Union rank the United States with North Korea and Syria as dangerous to peace.

That is why it is so important, and why so many of us throughout the world hope and pray that London will see a demonstration such as has never been seen before, powerful enough to shatter the President's ignorant complacency. Please do not fail us!

Judge RICHARD E TUTTLE
(Retired, California Superior Court)
Mokelumne Hill, California, USA

Sir: How would Ken Livingstone feel if the terrorists flew their planes into buildings in London instead of New York? Mr Livingstone's comments calling the American President the greatest threat to world peace is forgetting Mr Bin Laden and the millions who support him. They started this, not America.

I guess people like Mr Livingstone would suggest we just pretend it doesn't exist and it will all go away as the terrorists continue to organise and conduct terror all over the globe. What about the Bali bombing and the bombing at a hotel in Jakarta? What about the Sudan, where people are being enslaved and killed because they are not Muslim? There are so many other examples of this worldwide jihad, but what does Mr Livingstone suggest?

Remember the Nazis and how people desperately tried to pretend Hitler wasn't all that bad? Pretending didn't make the problem go away; it made it worse.

I don't agree with everything Mr Bush has done, but I'm proud he's my President and I'm proud Tony Blair is a leader with courage to fight when he must. Stopping this type of tyranny takes willpower, blood, and many lives so that people like Mr Livingstone can complain about those who dare to act. I pray that Londoners never have to go through what New Yorkers have been through, but if they do, then they will know we really are at war and the only thing that will stop it is force.

RICK CLOUGH
Rustburg, Virginia, USA

Sir: Michael Gasaway, of South Carolina (letter, 19 November) wants to know how Ken Livingstone became Mayor of London.

Well, Michael, this is what happened. The names of all the people who wanted to be Mayor were put on pieces of paper. The people of London then each marked a cross against the name of the person they preferred. Ken Livingstone received the most crosses, so he became Mayor.

This is called "democracy". It may seem a strange system to you, as a citizen of a country whose leader gained power by other means, but a lot of people in the world think it is fairer. Why not consider it?

MICHAEL BROADBENT
Bishop Auckland, Co Durham

Sir: Here is why I am marching in protest against the Bush administration.

On behalf of Sabrin, Ilaf and Abbas Abdullah, three Iraqi children who each lost a leg when their family truck was hit by a US rocket. Lest we forget the lies which preceded the illegal invasion, and the war that has killed and maimed thousands.

To exercise the democratic right to peaceable assembly to protest an administration whose actions are motivated by special interests and whose policies violate human rights. Lest we forget the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and the democratic premise of liberty and justice for all.

In honour of my dearly beloved older brother, William (Bing) Emerson, a helicopter pilot killed in action on 20 November 1968 in Vietnam. Lest we forget the lessons of history.

ELLEN EMERSON
(an American in London)
London NW3

Sir: If it is anti-American to be anti-Bush, is it anti-Iraqi to be anti-Saddam?

LES PARSONS
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire

Sir: T-shirts and other merchandise with the slogan BUCK FUSH are understandably on wide sale in the United States. In this country they are unobtainable, despite the state visit. What hope is there for British manufacturing if it cannot exploit market opportunities like this?

RICHARD HELLER
London SE1

Sir: Would I be right in assuming George Bush will be paying the appropriate congestion charge whilst he is chauffeured around London?

NICK BOWMAN
London SE1

Saddam's crimes

Sir: Dr David Lowry's letter (17 November) noted between 27,000 and 55,000 Iraqi deaths (including 7,800-9,600 civilians) since the invasion, and made the assertion that the allies' "death count in just eight months far outweighs Saddam's murderous regime at its worst".

During the seven-month Anfal campaign of 1998 alone, the Hussein regime massacred between 50,000 and 110,000 Kurdish civilians in cold blood. For the allies to invade and conquer Iraq with under 10,000 civilian dead shows that the coalition made an effort to avoid killing noncombatants, in contrast to the former regime, which went out of its way to slaughter civilians. Various estimates put Saddam's total body count at nearly 1,000,000 in his 23 years in power.

Besides the massacres, the former regime in Iraq gouged out eyes, cut off tongues and ears, gassed, drowned, burned alive, tore out fingernails, electrocuted, beat to death, immersed in acid, sodomised and raped countless thousands of men and women and even children. In many cases the mutilated corpses were dumped outside relatives' houses so everyone could see the horrors visited upon those poor wretches.

Whether the invasion was justified may be a moot point, but for Dr Lowry to make such a comparison between the former regime and the allied forces is odious.

BOB PINDER
Market Deeping, Lincolnshire

US troops in Iraq

Sir: I would like to raise to your attention the fact that the article that appeared in the 17 November edition of your newspaper, based on an interview with Mr Javier Solana, under the title "US agrees to international control of its troops in Iraq", does not reflect the conversation he had with Leonard Doyle and Stephen Castle, in Brussels on 14 November.

Particularly misleading, in light of the well-known position of the US government on these matters, were the title as well as several references attributed to Javier Solana on the situation in Iraq and related developments concerning US military forces deployed in the country.

CRISTINA GALLACH
Spokesperson of the EU High Representative for the CFSP, Javier Solana
Brussels

And another thing

Sir: It isn't only Blake who starts sentences with "and" (letter, 18 November). Virtually every great writer in English, from Chaucer onwards, has done it routinely. It's fine with Fowler's Modern English Usage, too. The mystery is why people have come to believe it's wrong.

LINDSAY CAMP
Bristol

Sir: The first word of the greatest book indisputably to have been written by the first ever English author is (albeit in Latin) "and". The Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People begins with the sentence "Et Britannia insula est" - "And Britain is an island." Beat that, you pedants!

NICHOLAS MACY
Harlow, Essex

Lurid scenes

Sir: It's a dilemma - do you encourage your children to read a good broadsheet newspaper or do you come over all Mary Whitehouse in the face of reports such as John Walsh's on the "adult lifestyle" exhibition at Olympia (17 November)? My 14-year-old son's eye would be drawn straight to the photo of a semi-naked woman addressing two fully dressed punters, and his mind boggled by "butt plugs", the "urethra dilator" and "extra-large dildos". Should I whisk the paper from the breakfast table and give him a nice wholesome copy of The Sun instead?

LUCY HEWITT
Farnham, Surrey

Quick response

Sir: L J K Setright asserts that speed does not kill (Motoring, 8 November). I have a 16lb cannonball which, if I placed it on Mr Setright's head, would no doubt cause him some discomfort. However, were I to drop it on to his head instead of placing it I think he would have to admit that speed is certainly damaging, assuming he were alive to voice an opinion.

K C NOBLE
Kendal, Cumbria