How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [99]
So now you’re in the cinema, shaking with impotent fury. How can this have happened? All that watching and listening. All those late nights. Naturally, the film does have a happy ending because eventually they found a way around the rules on intercept evidence and at the retrial three men were found guilty of a plot.
Although, I do like the idea of a final scene in which Bond is seen at a meeting with Colonel Gadaffi, arranging for BAE Systems to ship some missiles to Cuba in exchange for the release of the convicted men on compassionate grounds.
This, really, is what has emerged from the proceedings. That no matter how real and how gritty the Bond producers try to make their films, they will never be able to match the tension of what almost certainly is happening today, possibly just down your street, just outside the post office.
Sunday 13 September 2009
Mad Johnny Baa Lamb is here to save the pit bulls
Last week the ringleaders of a Lincolnshire-based international dog-fighting gang were found guilty of various offences and warned that they faced lengthy jail terms. Needless to say, the whole country is now in a state of shock, completely at a loss to understand why on earth someone would get pleasure from watching their much-loved dog being ripped in half in someone’s front room.
This raises a question. Why are we so shocked? The pit bulls used in dog fighting are not like the doe-eyed mounds of fur and slobber that come to your breakfast table in a morning, hoping that a piece of bacon will fall on the floor. They are Millwall dogs. They are born to fight one another and when they are not fighting they fill their time by eating babies. Trying to get a pit bull to lead a peaceful life, reading poetry and pressing the buttons on pelican crossings for blind people, is as impossible as getting Michael Palin to hose down a bus queue with machinegun fire. It can’t be done and for this reason you aren’t even allowed to own such a dog in this country.
But people do. They take the risks. They spend the money. They train their animals and they meet with other members of the Enormous Tattoo Owners’ Club in garages and sitting rooms in Lincolnshire, where they get their outlawed dogs to fight.
They’ve been doing this for ages. Dog fighting was such a big problem in the early nineteenth century that in 1835 Britain became the first country in the world to make it illegal. Today, almost every other country in the civilized world, and America, has followed suit.
Of course, fans of the ‘sport’ would doubtless maintain that it’s traditional, that war dogs were used for fighting in Roman times and that in fourteenth-century Japan fighting dogs could be used instead of money for paying taxes to the shogun. Doubtless this is true but it’s also nonsense. I’m happy to shoot a partridge and eat a cow’s front leg. I’m also happy to watch a lion being torn apart by a crocodile – and so are you, to judge by the popularity of warts-and-all nature documentaries. But in a civilized country you can’t really have people running dog fights. Common sense dictates it’s just wrong.
So, what’s to be done? The government, believing that everything can be solved with more laws and more enforcement, would undoubtedly decide that a special taskforce should be set up, but this is impossible since the police are far too busy these days learning how to use ladders and bicycles. Women with frizzy hair and disappointing breasts would inevitably say that it could all be solved if violent video games were banned and more money were spent on education. Publicans, meanwhile, would suggest that it’s because all the nation’s pubs are closing down so there’s nothing else to do.
Me? I believe the best course of action is to provide those who like dog fighting with an alternative. In short, we should look for another sort of fighting animal they can use. Cocks won’t work because watching two roosters going at one another is even more traumatic than watching two dogs.