Plastering Peewit is an insult to Ethiopians

I’LL TELL you what’s wrong with this country – our perverse attitude towards animals. And not just our pets.

Do you know which is the richest charity in Britain? You’d assume that it was something really important, like Cancer Research or the NSPCC. Think again: it’s actually a donkey sanctuary in Devon.

There ageing donkeys with gold-encrusted hooves watch re-runs of Black Beauty on plasma screens while eating caviar and foie gras from diamond-studded bowls. They sleep in mink-lined stables attended to by semi-naked Catherine Zeta Jones look-alikes. Once a month they sneak off to Alton Towers for secret night-time rides on the big dipper. And they’ve got an executive box at Chelsea – on the halfway line.

And all because mad old women would rather leave the contents of their wills to Popsy, Rosie and Silver rather than to abused children or doomed teenagers. It’s enough to make a cat laugh (especially if it’s a lodger in a luxury cats’ home where they breakfast on sugar mice and are allowed to play in the communal koi carp pool).

Look at the picture of Peewit the lapwing. Now lapwings are comparatively common birds. According to the RSPB’s website, getting on for two million of them winter in this country. Let’s put it like this – they’re not exactly golden fucking eagles.

Yet some fool at the nauseatingly-named St Tiggywinkles wildlife hospital in Dorset, where Peewit was taken after being found with a compound fracture of his right knee, has seen fit to reset and plaster the bird’s leg before feeding him antibiotics and painkillers.

It’s utterly pointless. What’s going to happen once Peewit is released into the wild? However well his leg heals, he’s still going to be a cripple. He won’t last five minutes before he’s caught and eaten (unless he’s very lucky and is chased by a cat full of sugar mice and koi carp who can’t catch up with him).

I’ll tell you about “releasing things into the wild”. A bird recently flew into our conservatory and battered itself against the glass for an hour. Once I’d finally trapped it with a tea towel and taken it outside, Mrs B enquired as to its condition.

“Oh, it’s fine,” I said. “Flew away, no problem.” Well, it would have done if it hadn’t been dead in the dustbin.

Similarly, the family of baby mice we “rescued” when clearing out the garage. “Are they safe?” she asked, after I dumped them in the field next door. “Of course,” I replied. “Playing away happily.” Well, perhaps. If I hadn’t accidentally dropped them in a patch of nettles.

I hate to think how much time and money was wasted on Peewit. I also hate to think how many full English breakfasts that cash would have bought for starving Ethiopian babies. Perhaps we should stick them in a stable in Devon and bring coachloads of mad old ladies round to see them …

DOES ANYONE know who were the two Nanny State nutters who complained to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, about scenes of gratuitous smoking in a couple of Tom and Jerry cartons? I suspect you’ll be able to recognize them by the rolled-up copy of The Guardian under their arm; their mad, deranged, middle-class stare; and the fact that their children are wearing crash helmets, knee pads and cricket boxes just to pop down to the shops.

What happens now is nothing more than cultural vandalism, as the Turner Network works its way through all 162 episodes of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s masterpieces, carefully excising any ciggy-related material. Will they do that to paintings of Winston Churchill or Van Gogh’s self-portrait next? What about Magritte’s surrealist painting This Is Not A Pipe, which features … err … a pipe? Shall we just burn it now and get it over with?

Now of course we shouldn’t encourage children to smoke. But we shouldn’t encourage them to lure coyotes over cliffs either. Or hit each other with frying pans, leaving their little brother or sister with a flat, three-foot wide face. We should advise them against dropping an anvil on a passing stranger, or fooling a vicious guard dog into swallowing a stick of dynamite.

Funnily enough, our newspapers seem bereft of stories detailing these incidents which, following the Leftie logic, must happen on a worryingly regular basis. I wonder why?

OF COURSE, it doesn’t really matter because smoking is about to be consigned to history when the government introduces its new regulations on what was supposed to be a ban in public places. We now learn that “public places” may well include your car (if it’s a company vehicle) or even your own home (if you’ve got it registered with the taxman as your main workplace).

This prompts the delightful image of Johnny Homeworker having a crafty fag in their own bathroom and then having to fine themselves £50 for transgressing the law. Oh, and it’s a £200 fine if you fail to put up No Smoking signs all over the place. That’s going to go down really well with the houseproud missus.

So you can’t smoke at work, in your company car, in the pub or at home. The only thing left to do is buy a convertible and drive round with the roof down. But wait, enter stage left 68-year-old retired carpenter Alan Joyce of Poole, Dorset (just down the road from St Tiggywinkles, probably).

Mr Joyce has just been sent a £75 fixed penalty for littering. His crime? He was spotted flicking cigarette ash out of his car window by one of the council’s secret police. What nonsense. He’d have got away with less for hitting someone in the face with a cartoon frying pan.

O The views of Mr Beelzebub are purely personal and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Editor or staff of this website, of anyone not wondering where the August heatwave we were promised disappeared to, of anyone who isn't highly amused that the world's biggest cricket cheats are throwing their toys out of the pram after being accused of cheating, or of anyone who read that story about the Chinese building a replica English town outside Shanghai complete with pub, village green and church, and who didn't wonder if there'd be a Chinese takeaway.