I wrote to you the other week expressing my respect for farming and lamenting the lack of appreciation that farmers get from society at large (Farmers: dispensable, contemptible beggars in a high-tech economy, 7 December 1999), but after reading the article, Hen welfare rule 'could kill egg sales', in today's Telegraph, I am filled with disgust for the attitude of the National Farmers' Union (NFU) towards European laws aimed at improving animal welfare.

It was this attitude, with its advocacy of the disrespectful, callous methods of industrial farming, that brought us BSE.

I have no respect for farmers who themselves have no respect for the Earth and its creatures, misusing land and animals in their drive for efficiency and profits, and who would no doubt provide human meat if the market demanded and the law permitted it!

Hopefully, Tim Bennett, deputy president of the NFU, and Ian McHardy, with his battery hens, will come back in their next lives as farm animals themselves and get a taste of the kind of treatment they are now dishing out and defending.