Hedgehog cull a big cost

W F Kerswell (Letters 23/01/07) is mistaken. A hedgehog cull on the Uist islands in Scotland doesn't prove "that there is no such thing as a balance of nature". All it proves is that Scottish Natural Heritage and its partners in the Uist Wader Project are prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' pounds slaughtering hedgehogs.

Hedgehogs are one of several creatures on the islands that predate ground nesting birds' eggs. Others include gulls, feral cats, rats and mink. Hedgehogs are not native to the islands (a few were taken there by humans in the 1970s to control slugs) and when a problem arose the powers-that-be decided to kill them rather than relocate them to the mainland.

We, and our partners in Uist Hedgehog Rescue (UHR), collect and relocate as many hedgehogs as we can and recent scientific research has confirmed that hedgehogs can be successfully relocated.

This seemingly obvious solution could have been responsible for the Shropshire Star 'predicting the future' (Letter from Richard Camp 25/01/07). Logic would indeed dictate that the hedgehogs will now be moved rather than killed. Scottish Natural Heritage is however still 'considering'.

Fay Vass, British Hedgehog Preservation Society, Ludlow