Animal rights campaigners have called for an end to a �50,000 cull of rats aimed at saving a colony of rare seabirds.

Conservationists are to kill thousands of rats on Lundy Island to protect the rocky outcrop's puffin and Manx shearwater populations.

But animal protection organisation Animal Aid believes reasoning behind the mass extermination on the island in the Bristol Channel is flawed.

It wants the groups behind the cull - including the RSPB, English Nature and the National Trust - to call it off and find another way of restoring the balance between the island's birds and rats.

Mass extermination

English Nature has called in experts to lay traps and get rid of the rats, which it says are putting the seabirds at risk by eating their eggs and chicks.

But Animal Aid campaigns oficer Becky Lilly said: "This is an attempt to restore ecological harmony through wholesale slaughter.

"It is not the way forward - in this case more controls on commercial fishing, management of pollution and protection of breeding sites would help boost the seabird population."

It is feared up to 40,000 rats which have arrived on the island from visiting boats are behind a drop in the bird population.

But Animal Aid says the species at the centre of the Lundy Island cull, the black rat, is one of the rarest mammals in the UK, while neither the shearwater nor the puffin are endangered species.

It says rats have lived on the island for more than 400 years, while the bird population has only begun to decline in the past 60 years.

The group says killing off one species to save another is "absurd" and worries that poison put down to kill rats could harm other animals.