I am pleased to see that the call made by Min­is­ter of Tourism Stephen Cadiz to re­con­sid­er hunt­ing in T&T is at­tract­ing the views of oth­ers by way of the me­dia. Hunt­ing for sure has been part of the cul­ture and so­cial fab­ric of this coun­try, but as Guardian let­ter writer, Ian Lam­bie, point­ed out Tues­day, much has re­mained the same since 1958.

De­spite the de­crease in wildlife pop­u­la­tions and loss of habi­tats to sus­tain them, we still give vast lee­way to a se­lect crowd of some 12,000 or more hunters to in­vade the an­i­mals' ter­ri­to­ry and fur­ther dec­i­mate them.

The time for ac­tion is now and de­bates like this can on­ly be healthy and lead to so­lu­tions and com­pro­mis­es in the best in­ter­est of the an­i­mals. We have a Min­is­ter of Gov­ern­ment open­ly stat­ing his sup­port for a ban and we should take ad­van­tage of this op­por­tu­ni­ty to sway his col­leagues.

I was able to re­call his ref­er­ence to the two-year mora­to­ri­um im­posed dur­ing the time of Lin­coln My­ers and know from speak­ing with vil­lagers in rur­al ar­eas that wildlife had in­creased dur­ing this time. We need to ex­er­cise bet­ter stew­ard­ship for these de­fence­less an­i­mals so peo­ple from all over the coun­try would talk about them in­creas­ing in num­bers.

Cos­ta Ri­ca and Mr Cadiz have fired the open­ing sal­vo; let us now cap­i­talise on this to build mo­men­tum and ban hunt­ing.

M James,

Mem­ber, ZSTT