AS an old person, I have often expressed bitterness about the ageism of the society we live in, and especially within the independence movement (which I support) following the 2014 disappointment, leading to expressions of eagerness for my generation’s death, plus calls for our disenfranchisement on grounds that we have no stake in the future.

However, I hope that the following paragraph in yesterday’s National (Calls for abuse law and local tax reform in FM’s programme, September 3) is just an example of careless wording on somebody’s part: “Lord Bracadale also concluded there should be a new statutory aggravation based on ‘age hostility’.”

So now it’s not just inflammatory speech in threatening circumstances (“outside the corn-dealer’s house” being the classic test) that’s to be criminalised, but our very emotions, or at least any expression of them!

No, no, no. Whoever is the object of hostility, let acts (including unmistakable incitement) against that person or group be defined as crimes, or “aggravations”, but never mere expressions of feeling, however offensive those expressions may be. That way lies the ultimate tyranny of thought control.

Katherine Perlo
Forfar

READ MORE: Sturgeon urged to reform abuse law and local tax reform​

THE process for evaluating children by testing does not take place in P1. A test and an assessment are different.

I am disgusted that many parliamentarians and many teachers either do not know the difference or are very willing to use the educational development of children for the development of their own careers or for political aims.

To put what happens in schools into perspective it should be noted that health visitors are also tasked with assessing children of pre-school age and have been for years.

For example, babies and young children are weighed regularly to ensure that they are thriving physically. Who objects to this?

Further health visitors are tasked with checking that language development is progressing at a reasonable rate during a short meeting with the child and this has been part of our world for many, many years. If language skills are not developing at a reasonable rate, for the sake of the child, this must be detected at an early age. That is the best way to find out what is holding the child back and find a solution, for example detecting deafness.

Children should be assessed and if a professional assesses them a) the child will not know that they are being assessed and thus not stressed by the process and b) there is no failure, no mater what is detected by an assessment. The point of an assessment is to find out how to best serve the child’s needs then devise a programme to best serve the child’s needs. Children need real care and love to become well-adjusted adults living life to their full potential, and assessments are part of that process. Find out what the child needs, which is not the same as what the child wants, then provide it.

If you care about children, do not use the word “test” when you mean “assess”.

Once over the age of 50, adults in Scotland are able to take part in assessment for bowel cancer to find out if treatment is recommended. These assessments are not tests, they are a potential benefit to many individuals, even sometimes life-saving.

A very angry mother of four and grandmother of six

I WELCOMED Kirsteen Paterson’s article exposing the damage to wild salmon stocks caused by the aquaculture industry (Scottish Wish salmon ‘under threat’ over sea lice ‘plague’, September 4).

Sea lice are endemic, that is true, but in natural conditions salmon used to carry two or three of these parasites with no ill effect. What is unnatural is for them to be “smothered with many hundreds of sea lice”. So unnatural that the lice are actually killing the hosts they rely on for their own survival.

Also in nature when salmon return to their home river to spawn, the sea lice die off within 24 hours of entering fresh water.

Adult salmon have usually been at sea for one or two years, benefitting from rich feeding, and then return weighing six, ten, sometimes 15 or more pounds and in peak physical condition ready for the competitive rigours of mating and spawning. At least some of the returning adults may make it to fresh water, and despite being weakened by lice infestation have a chance to carry out their natural function.

Kirsteen glosses over the much more serious effect on the juvenile salmon leaving the river. With the limited nutrition in rocky highland spate rivers they may take two or three years to reach a few inches in length and a few ounces in weight.

When these striplings eventually feel able to make their adolescent journey to sea they are wiped out by contact with sea lice. The lice will of course thrive in sea water and the little fish are doomed. In the next couple of years there will be no adult stock to return. It does not take decades to kill a salmon river – only a few years.

Murray Dunan
Auchterarder

READ MORE: Scottish wild salmon ‘under threat’ over killer sea lice ‘plague’​