A LITTLE more than a century ago, people commonly shot wild birds. Even songbirds.

The great naturalist Richard Jefferies reported how, in winter particularly, when birds sought food in the bare hedges, "on a Sunday morning you may hear the country for miles round London and other populous towns resounding with an almost constant fusillade from the hedgerow brigade...

"Not only may blackbirds and thrushes be shot... the crafty gunner need not despair of even bringing home such honourable trophies as fieldfares and redwings. In a severe and prolonged frost most of the bird tribe, from wrens and robins up to magpies and lapwings, is more or less at the mercy of the hedge popper.''

Even in summer the slaughter went on. "Linnets and bramble finches present an easy mark as they sit on the tips of the gorse and blackberry bushes. In duller weather a likely place will be the banks of some river or pond, where the reed warblers and marsh tits flit from bush to bush and the lively little water wagtails trot along unsuspectful of their fate.''

Amazing? Well, we are talking the century before last. Attitudes have changed for the better, wouldn't you say? Here's a more recent example of the same progression.

For two decades or so after the Second World War the traditional circus, with performing animals as its centrepiece, was as popular as ever. But the biggest billing in the circus currently touring the North-East, Uncle Sam's, is for NO ANIMAL ACTS. Only without them does any circus survive. Suspicious about what goes into taming lions and tigers, we also recognise that having an elephant squat on a stool is an affront to the animal's natural dignity.

It is this ever-advancing respect for animals that has caught up with fox hunting. Crucially, this involves people taking pleasure from an activity that imposes often-prolonged fear upon a hunted animal which, if caught, will usually have been run to the point of exhaustion.

Which brings us, again, to the Countryside March. Even if all 400,000 marchers were defending fox hunting (which many deny) what needs to be remembered is that Labour won two landslide elections on a manifesto that included what was generally taken to be - as Labour no doubt intended - a promise to ban fox hunting. This apparent commitment certainly gained Labour more than 400,000 votes.

Labour's mistake was not to have swept away hunting at once, leaving it free to concentrate on what the hunters insist are 'bigger' issues. These do indeed include many rural problems, headed by the place of farming, and farmers, in a much-changed world. But, as long as the battle over hunting continues, it will absorb time and energy that should go into creating a vibrant rural economy for the 21st Century - hopefully with farmers, who have become more peripheral, back at its heart.

Paradoxically, since public esteem will increasingly be incompatible with practices deemed cruel, the abolition of hunting is in the long term interest of the rural community.