When I gave up eating meat in the early Seventies, I was regularly met with the same warning trotted out in "Uneasy feeling" (Opinion, March 27).

Conversely, it was that we would be overrun by animals.

There were just a few of us "cranks" in those days but three decades have seen our number grow to several millions without ecological disaster.

The anonymous correspondent clearly does not live in the real world, where the continued increase in vegetarianism will be a slow but sure process, not an overnight wonder.

It will also be peculiar to Britain, our neighbours, such as the French, having even less sense of animal welfare than the woefully unenlightened Tony Blair.

Incidentally, anon should know pets can survive perfectly well without meat.

My lurcher is robust on a vegetarian diet that he wolves down and there is, I gather, a new taurine-containing formula suitable for cats.

-William Fraser, Summerheath Road, Hailsham