TO PUT the record straight, 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.
The HSA 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 team at the Countryside Alliance. Ultimately they have nothing to lose, and seemingly everything to gain by trying to push the angling is the next target' angle.
The hunt ban eradicated 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 but it's not about people-hating, class hatred or terrorism - it's plain and simple about cruelty.
If you want to spend an afternoon by the river bank 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.
Dawn Preston, Hunt Saboteurs Association.
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