Madam,

You have covered the unwanted large-scale housing development on Primrose Hill, Llanbadarn Fawr, which has been given the provisional go-ahead by Ceredigion County Council. The council was happy that it wouldn’t affect wildlife. Yet last weekend another dead badger was found on the adjacent road. I remember when the council gave permis-sion for the housing estates up Cefn Llan – until then I’d only seen live badgers as I walked home. After the estates were built on the meadows I started seeing dead ones (usually hit by cars, since there is a lot more traffic each time a new estate is built). This is going to be an even more common sight if the wildlife fields there are built on. It’s also worth mentioning that, although the council claimed there weren’t animals living on the site, that’s not the main issue: animals use wild areas as their transit and foraging grounds even when they don’t live on the site. Building houses there (and the consequent people, noise, vehicles and so on that follow) inevitably disrupts all this, takes from the wildlife survival areas, and – as is found all too often – it creates extra threats to the survival of badgers and other wildlife. This is all common sense, but seems to evade or be irrelevant to those who make planning decisions.

Yours etc

Karl Drinkwater

Llanbadarn Fawr

Aberystwyth.