I MUST reply to Andrew Butler - 'The Tender Trap' (Letters, October 22). Most of us appreciate and derive benefits from those animals which are either a direct comfort to us or pose no harm at all.

Mr Butler's view, written in Beatrix Potter style, portraying rats and mice as small furry animals only seeking to live with us and creating no problems, is a huge misrepresentation.

Rats and mice carry a wide range of diseases such as salmonella and campylobacter, which can be passed on to human food when they run over our kitchen surfaces.

Rats are known to carry Weil's disease, leptospiral jaundice, which can be contracted by humans and domestic animals such as dogs from the rats' urine.

Quite rightly, where these animals such as rats live happily outside on river banks they are not persecuted, but when they affect our health and foodstuffs they become a problem.

He mentions contraception for rodents, which has been discarded as useless as rats are very sensitive to taste and reject drug-laden food.

I would also like to point out that capturing house mice in humane traps and then taking them some distance away in the country to release them is not so humane.

They are actually house mice. They have evolved to live inside premises - they will die outside.

A A STEPHENS, General Manager Public Relations UK, Rentokil Initial, East Grinstead, West Sussex.

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