I WAS shocked that you printed the letter from Jeremy D Fox in which he offered to go into Rowntree Park with his shotgun and kill the geese (August 22).

What sort of world are we living in? An increasingly violent world. How are we ever going to teach compassion to children - who are apparently suffering so much as a result of sharing this earth with the geese - if we only show them violence?

Because I approach this from an animal lover's point of view, if I were to offer my services with a 12-bore, I should be labelled as a terrorist. Double standards?

If the Evening Press hadn't printed that first letter from the pregnant woman complaining about the geese some weeks ago, this whole issue would never have re-surfaced, and now that it has, the coverage has been more pro-killing the geese than anti.

The logical thing to do would be to completely fill in the pond which runs through the park because as long as there is water there, geese will be attracted to it.

In response to Charles Rushton's letter on the same night, everyone has a different idea of vermin. As for all Canadians seeing these geese as vermin, I wonder why the group of Canadian tourists outside Clifford's Tower the other day stopped to admire the Canadian geese?

Sarah Bramley,

Seymour Grove,

Heworth, York.

Updated: 11:03 Thursday, August 25, 2005