A couple of days back Mr Harvey of the Forestry Commission was interviewed on the Today Programme on Radio 4 about the wild boar roaming the Forest of Dean. In answer to questions he estimated that we have some 600 wild boar at large. Last year they had shot some 78 of them and another 22 had been killed by road traffic. He described at length the damage they were causing especially around Beechenhurst which the Commission was proud of as a leisure area. He said that the ploughed up turf would not right itself; reseeding and starting again was expensive and futile as the boar were capable of smashing through the toughest fences and it would be back to square one. They were already roaming beyond the Forest and one farmer was complaining of £20,000 worth of damage. I myself know of one resident who keeps horses in a toughly-fenced 10-acre field which they have broken into and ruined.

When asked if he would kill perhaps another 200 Mr Harvey replied this was a waste of time as within a year they would be back to the present sized population. My grandchildren were taken to one of their favourite bluebell woods near Blakeney which like so much of the Forest has been trashed.

Bluebell corms were scattered on the surface in profusion.

The children went down on their hands and knees trying hopelessly to push them back into the soil. Left alone in a few years our glorious bluebell woods will be just memories. They are flowers that can survive the shade of the Commission's dense conifer plantations but they will not survive foraging pigs.

Nor will the boar remain confined to the Forest of Dean. Left to breed they will within a decade be all over the region. In France they were concentrated in the huge forests in the South West of the country. I heard a French farmer in distant Lorraine saying that he shot 30 of them on his land that morning. The French Government is paying out millions of euros nationally in compensation. There is only one solution which is urgently to shoot the lot of them in all out war. I know there are a lot of local people who support "Our wild boar" and feel they are defending "Our Forest". But to let things alone means that great swathes of the woodlands and green space will be turned to thickets of scrub, traffic accidents will multiply, farmers will be ruined. Gardeners will be in despair. If the executive branch of the NFU, known officially as Defra, charters attack helicopters with infra red-sights to kill all the boar I would support them. The best definition of "civilisation" is forethought.

With climate change, reduction of water supplies, and above all the increase in population (80,000 every day) food production to feed us all will be a growing problem. On the outbreak of World War II the Government ordered the slaughter of a million head of cattle as arable farming is more productive. As a child I was directed to do all the family grocery shopping and queuing to hand over our ration books to have the coupons removed.

I had also charge of nine Rhode Island Red chickens. Churchill developed a taste for quail eggs at his club in London (described in his memoirs). But the rest of us scrounged enjoying our village baked bread with powdered chalk in it to make it white (which amazingly stamped out rickets). Our future should not be determined by wild boar. The Government is bad enough.

– Roger Horsfield, Bream.