As a hunter and ecologist, I take exception to the letter from Brian Young who finds a child's last dream to go on an African safari a "disgusting wish" (December 27).

There is nothing more fundamental to the human experience than that of hunting. In over two million years, hunting instincts evolved as a survival mechanism, which allowed human beings to develop intellect and venture into the most inhospitable regions of the globe. Hunting has been hard wired into the human psyche, and is in many ways, the essence of our very being. It is not surprising that a child facing death would want to strip the layers that separate our pampered existence from nature, and experience first- hand, the fundamental principle that it is life that sustains life in this world. To hunt is to confront the paradox of taking life to sustain life, and to come face to face with the reality of our own mortality in the death of an animal.

Hunting is a legal, ethical and spiritual human legacy than spans evolutionary history and cultures around the world. I too have travelled to Nairobi and seen the children. Kenya is a country where communities have lost control over their own resources, an impoverished people existing in a country full of natural wealth and beauty. While I was there, the government destroyed almost 200 lions because they were threatening an endangered species of antelope. These lions would have fetched close to $20,000 US each from safari hunters. And while I was there, drought ravaged huge portions of the country, millions of people were threatened by famine and were already dying.

There is no hunting of big game in Kenya. Animal rights organisations from the US, Canada, Britain and the European Union have seen to that by lining the pockets of the Kenyan regime, to impose their ideology and values on the people of Kenya. Western- based animal rights groups now control the wildlife belonging to the people of Kenya. They pay the government to burn African ivory, while lions kill people and livestock, elephants destroy crops, people starve and children beg in the streets.

Mr. Young, your colleagues at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Humane Societies of Canada and the United States, Greenpeace and other extremist organisations are already hard at work on your particular brand of third world awareness. God save their children.