Christmas-time. Peace on earth, and goodwill to all men. But not, it seems, to all animals. How else to explain the current blitz of hate-fest  letters calling for the complete extermination, or reduction to a biologically untenable rump, of the Forest's wild boar population?

Have some of you not had enough bloodshed already? Have all those dead badgers not assuaged your need to visit violent, agonising death on helpless creatures just trying to survive in a country which once prided itself both on its tolerance and on its reputation as a nation of animal lovers, but which now seems to be mutating into a race of rabid two-legged attack dogs and sub-Richard-Littlejohn mouth-foamers?

Shame on you. Everyone else is trying to celebrate a time of year when we hark to a millennia-old message of love and forbearance, and hope for a brighter, kinder future, yet all the while some of you  (often, it has to be said, conveniently anonymously) clearly prefer  an alternative vision, of the repeated crack of gunshots, the stench of freshly spilled blood, and the hoarse wheeze of terrified death-throes.

I am not greatly impressed by all this talk of culling "400" wild boar. Official (gu)estimates of their numbers tend to veer erratically from 400 to "possibly as many as 600" boar in the Forest, but, as with the various assumptions made about the fallow deer population over the years, these don't stand up to  prolonged scrutiny.

My  five-times-a-week wide-ranging walks in the woods on all four sides of Cinderford take in about one-eighth of the total wooded area of the Dean as a whole.

I  see boar, deer (not just fallow) and much other wildlife regularly, but – with one exception – the only boar in those woods in the last two years have been the same small herd of two young-adult females and six adolescent youngsters.

The one exception was the appearance last spring of another group, of four adults and nine striped piglets, but this one-off sounder  never returned.

The same applies to the deer: they are nothing like as numerous as some would  claim. If there were 400 or 600 boar  loose in the Dean, there would hardly be a bluebell, foxglove or blade of grass left standing, and the animals themselves would be dropping dead from starvation or malnutrition. As it is, like the deer, many are falling prey to poachers and trophy hunters,  perishing from accidents or natural causes, or other forms of mortality.

That the boar (and deer, and badgers) uproot the turf is undeniable: it's part of their food-gathering behaviour.

Whether it's anything like as destructive as the damage caused by various human activities in our area over the last few years, or that mooted to take place  in the near future, is highly debatable.

In a recent article in Radio Times, Sir David Attenborough attributed the survival of our favourite Christmas bird, the robin, to its ability to take advantage of the worms and grubs exposed by the digging of wild pigs in the woods and forests of Europe, during winters when otherwise the soil would be too hard-set and frozen for such vital food to be available to small birds and mammals.

Contrast this ecological benefit with the less-than-beneficial behavioural patterns of certain members of the public – both locals and visitors – over the last few years, and we may perhaps see a different side to the "problem" boar.

The photographs of rucked-up sports pitches and playing fields look pretty bad, but I suspect a well-attended and hotly contested match or two during the wetter months of the year would  not be that much gentler on the grass.

Nor would the spectators – few of the recreation grounds or playing fields I've seen recently have been free of the usual deluge of drink  cans, fast-food containers, fag packets and all the other life-affirming detritus that 21st-century homo sapiens ("wise man"!?) seems incapable of placing in those highly visible receptacles clearly marked "litter".

Similarly, many of the perimeter fences are in a poor state of repair due to the same spectators repeatedly clambering over them rather than walk 50 yards to the nearest gate when leaving. 

I thought sport was supposed to remind the onlooker of  the joys and benefits of self-disciplined behaviour and healthy physical exercise? Hmm.

The recently-reported whining and whinging from those poor loves unable to park their cars on the grass verges during well-attended funerals at Yew Tree Brake, because of the "heavy damage" caused by the boar, is hilarious. Excuse me, at what point exactly did the boar initiate this problem?

The motorists themselves started the ball rolling by parking there in the first place, long before the boar arrived.

Do you fondly imagine that repeatedly hauling thundering great 4x4s, people-carriers and estates on and off rain-sodden turf and foliage is in some magical, wondrous way not going to tear up the greenery at its roots level?

Hence the deep bays of mud and puddles gouged into the the cemetery verges and roadsides by precisely this  same human-instigated practice.  Pot, I'd like to introduce you to my old friend, kettle.

And why do we never hear calls for a cull of those infernal fly-parkers all over "our" beautiful Forest, who seize upon every patch of turf, every grassy bank, and dump their precious heaps of steel and rubber on them, smashing down the flowers and surface vegetation as if they were of no account?

Or the rapidly-growing franchises of Arthur Daley Motors springing up all over the Dean, who drive their cut-'n'-shunt rust-buckets up onto any bit of grass at the sides of main roads, stick a hastily-scrawled price-tag on them and clear off, leaving them as a noxious eyesore against the vert backdrop? No one is howling for their numbers to be reduced, I fear.

It's been noticeable of late that, alongside the long-term  rutting and denudation of the softer Forest pathways in the deeper parts of our woods by cyclists unwilling to use the hard-surfaced cycleways specially provided  for them, horse-riders too are starting to adopt the same destructive practice. One might have hoped our MP would be concerned by this damage to our native flora and invertebrate life, given that he's long championed the rights of horse-riders to access the woods (no prizes for guessing which way most of 'em vote), but then, probably not.

Easier to call for the boars' heads on a silver platter, to go alongside the badgers. Not to mention politically safer, when cosying up to deer-murderer  Dave.   

If the wild boar were to be wiped out tomorrow, do not think that the Forest would suddenly revert to a veritable Eden of unspoilt beauty and natural loveliness.

Not with the kind of people we are turning into these days. The clearings will continue to be wrecked by the ravers, druggies and alkies who have been setting fire to the woods or leaving them littered with cans, bottles, broken glass, their own excrement, used condoms, nappies and sanitary pads for several years now. Bags of doggy-doo will still festoon the branches.

Flytippers will still drive miles to dump their tyres, builders' waste, old carpets, tellies, fridges and sofas here. And the forestry will still wail that unless such behaviour stops it "may" be necessary to prosecute and fine the rotters responsible for it.

But the legislation to do so already exists, and has done for some years now. So why isn't anyone being hit with swingeing, behaviour-altering fines?

Or the deer and boar poachers being clobbered? Newent isn't that far, is it? I think we all know what I'm saying here, don't we?

Scum have been continually foisting their filth and foul, illegal behaviour on us for years, yet have any of them been properly punished? Dream on.

Worried about the turf and verges being grubbed up? Have you seen the new spine road Cinderford is supposed to be getting shortly, or the present suspicious-looking widening of the existing forestry tracks west of the northern  half of the Linear Park, where  the entire verges on both sides have been cheerfully obliterated by JCBs for  a mile and more? 

And will plonking down an entire new campus, hotel, several hundred new houses, parking lots, factories, warehouses, office blocks, access roads etc. etc. somehow be achieved without destroying untold acreages of woodland, shrubbery, grasslands, hillocks, wetlands and all their resident plants and animals?  Oh please.

Such is the fate that those woodlands that escape the bulldozer at Northern Arc will undergo. "human" agency, peeps, not animals.

And Cameron and Milliband are both currently pooping their Calvins trying to outdo each other in the speed with which they tear up the planning laws  so that  the Green Belt can be concreted over,  towns and cities can expand far past their settlement boundaries, and vast reams of rural England can disappear for ever under a merciless tsunami of urban sprawl. As a local JCB owner once said, "Beauty does not count."

So, no one feels "safe" with the boar? The word "feral" is being bandied about. I've encountered several boar at close quarters (not from design or intention) and have never been the slightest bit threatened.

Mostly they quickly scatter off into the trees and bracken. But I've been hit badly by a speeding illegal motorcyclist in the woods, have been subjected to deliberately menacing, intimidatory behaviour on several occasions by those who do not approve of my speaking up for animals and the wild, often have to jump  off the pavement to make way for hurtling cyclists who have claimed it as their own, and have had my garage door kicked in four times over the past two years, each time  shortly after reporting instances of motorcycling or drug-taking in the woods.

Meeting the boar is a positive pleasure, by contrast. Scores of people have died in road accidents in the Forest over the last few years. No  one has been killed by any boar, however.

So just why do we rush to accuse the boar, and gloatingly anticipate their deaths? Easy target, of course. To twist the Orwellian slogan, "Two legs good, four legs bad."

But, as shown in the points above, this may well not be true, however much we might wish it so. Easier to ignore the possibility of using oral contraceptives to keep boar, deer and squirrel numbers at a workable level and plump for  the even easier  money gained by selling their carcases to the meat trade.

All these creatures are trying to do, remember, is find food for themselves and their babies; when human beings do this we call it admirable, good family values and  so forth, worthy of the highest praise. But not when wild animals do it.

So, no room at the inn for our wild creatures, then Well, those rabid, right-minded blood-foamers who call for the boars' demise will be overjoyed to hear that there's one less of these savage, intractable beasts to fret about.

The body of  a youngster just into its first proper bristly coat was dumped  on the forestry track just above the cycletrack at Foxes Bridge Halt in the week before Christmas. Just a baby, really. Small, undersized, snuffed out before it had learnt  much about life at all.

Carrion birds and foxes had been at work, so there's no way of telling whether there was "human"  involvement in its death, but given the plethora of hate mail polluting the local press recently, I wouldn't be surprised.

Little more than a year old, and now crowbait just to prove some slimester's fetid point. Satisfied now, are we?

– Andrew Stephens, Cinderford.