DURING my professional career I would never have had the audacity to tell a tailor how to cut a suit, an electrician how to wire a house or a candlemaker how to make candles -- yet tailors, electricians and candlemakers, plus just about everyone else, were more than ready to leap in to tell me just where I was going wrong (as they saw it).

Yes, you are right, I was a zoological garden curator and all the evidence points to such ignorant arrogance still being alive and well in the North West and directed against the excellent Blackpool Zoological Garden (not "Zoo", please; would you call a botanical garden a "bot" or a hospital a "hosp"?).

Let it be firmly stated here and now, once and for all, that the only people competent and qualified to criticise or condemn zoological gardens are those with practical experience of wild animal husbandry.

Those who lack it, but seek to do so, can be likened to Philistines who would set out to destroy an instrument they haven't the skill to use and it's high time their utter ignorance was made public.

I hereby make the following challenge to Mrs Simpson and her coterie in Blackpool. I challenge you, plus three of your following (thus making it four against one), to an informal, verbal quiz, in public on your own ground -- Blackpool -- on animals, simply to see who knows most about them.

There will be rounds on mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, native fauna, domestic and farm stock, marine biology, extinct animal life, wild animal husbandry, evolution, scientific names and terminology, derivation of animal names, notable naturalists and zoologists.

When the public audience sees that what La Simpson and her acolytes know about the subject isn't worth knowing I trust they will then have the good sense to stop listening to her.

This, I emphasise, is a formal challenge -- and I eagerly await its acceptance.

Clinton Keeling,

Educational Services in Practical Zoology,

Guildford,

Surrey.