Of course I am with Elizabeth Allison on her point of giving thought to the welfare of animals (Mailbox, December 7).

The well-being of ours, while they were in our care and right up until their final end, was our prime consideration. This was why we ceased to use livestock markets and sold them straight to the abattoir, always transporting them ourselves if we could.

That's why I would enforce the buying of a dog licence costing £100 before a dog could be obtained. And why I would ban the keeping of pets in cages where they can be neglected and left to die, without food or water, by neglectful children and their parents.

However, I object to the way she uses her figures. When she claims that 1,000 million animals are killed for meat every year in the UK, "most in factory farms", a majority of readers will think automatically of sheep, cattle and pigs. In reality the vast majority of that number are chickens. I am not suggesting that chickens are not worthy of humane treatment – of course they are – but the way it is put is deliberately emotive and misleading.

Aside from chickens and some pigs, most animals are reared and kept in natural conditions.

On good scientific grounds I object to her automatic condemnation of cloning, which should actually reduce the number of animals killed because they are the wrong sex/shape/breed for the job required. Increasingly, and increasingly successfully, cloning will be used to produce the right animal for the required end use. While millions continue to eat meat, that will be good.

Ms Allison objects to the killing of badgers. She fails to mention the thousands of cattle killed every year because they are infected with TB. When I first came into farming in 1956, keeping cattle free of TB was still an up-hill battle and quite a new concept. All cows were tested annually. At that time it was accepted that badgers were a source of TB and a danger to the tuberculin-tested status of dairy herds.

Farmers and the general public were encouraged to report dead badgers on the road (not a common occurrence as they were then much fewer in number) to the "Min of Ag & Fish" as it was then called and the corpses were collected and tested for TB.

Towards the end of that period when all milking herds became TB-free, an infected badger was an extreme rarity. The two went hand-in-hand and so they do today. Until badgers are reduced in numbers and cleared of TB it will be impossible to control TB in cattle. Finally, the mega-dairy. Contrary to her belief that cattle love to be outside grazing, they are perfectly happy having the grass cut and brought to them. The less effort they have to make, the better they like it.

How would Ms Allison like to be outside in all the glories of the British weather? If you follow her line of thought we should all hanker after living in caves, hunting our food and cooking it over an open fire, clad only in bearskins.

Funnily enough, we like our warm, centrally-heated houses, with hot and cold running water and a flush loo indoors. The cattle are no different. Provide them with warmth, comfort and food on demand and they can spend the day loafing instead of foraging. That's the way they like it!

Wendy Warren, South Kilworth.