I have a great deal of respect for Jeanette Winterson. Not only is the author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit a wonderful writer, but her undulating thought pattern (check out her quotes at www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9399.Jeanette_Winterson?) can keep me pondering life’s profundities for hours.

But Accrington-raised Winterson got a severe trolling last week when she uploaded a picture of a dismembered bunny she’d caught eating her parsley. She killed it and posted a tweet stating it would “make a great glove puppet” to her 32,700 followers.

She defended her stance by saying the rabbit population is out of control and can not be left to simply breed. And that’s absolutely right.

Culling of several species on a regular basis is part of the order of life. It’s the reason our forests are not not overrun by deer and it’s the way safari parks, zoos and other commercial animal establishments keep their numbers down.

The problem is it offends humane sensibilities. Nobody wants to think of Bambi with a bullet through his head.

I felt pretty upset when I saw Ms Winterson’s rabbit because it reminded me of the time I very stupidly left our pet rabbit the run of our very high-walled garden overnight believing it would be safe and happy. I found him the following day looking very much like the Twitter picture.

I have, however, eaten rabbit in a paella in Spain and didn’t think twice about Mr Hoppity happily hopping around a field only hours before.

I can understand why vegetarians would be upset by Ms Winterson’s tweet, particularly with the glove puppet quip.

But I wonder how many of those hundreds of people who trolled Ms Winterson are actually non meat-eaters and how many were frying burgers on the barbie as they composed their venomous tweets.

There’s an awful lot of hypocrisy surrounding meat-eating.

We tuck into lamb chops and calves livers with no thought of the beautiful little animals that were sacrificed for our table or the way some of those animals were treated prior to slaughter.

It’s akin to the lack of thought process in buying cheap fashions without pausing to think if a child in a third world country had stayed awake all night to make it.

I didn’t enjoy the bunny picture, but I have to accept that unless I’m prepared to make a stance by foregoing meat, then I really have no right to complain.