Cruelty To Animals

Fuss and bother in France over halal meat. Do the indigenous Christians of the Middle East eat halal meat? If so, then there cannot be anything wrong with it in principle. It certainly bears comparison with the products of many of our own raising and slaughtering practices. (In similar vein, there is most definitely nothing wrong with financial services that eschew usury. The problem is our failure to reach into our own authentic tradition, thus leaving the way clear for Islam.)

The heresy of intégrisme is exactly that, but one might have thought that it would at least have given the Front National constituency some level of contact with the outposts of Christendom in the old French redoubts of Syria and Lebanon. Apparently not, though. Or, at least, not anymore. Not under Marine.

We tend to associate cruelty to animals with the French, but we are in no position to comment here on the Islands where, as the saying goes, God is spelled backwards. Crufts is upon us for another year. If breeding from brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and grandparents and grandchildren is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is. If the result that pugs, for example, are so inbred that, although there are ten thousand of them in Britain, there are in genetic terms only five hundred distinct individuals, is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is.

If the situation whereby fifty per cent of Cavalier King Charles spaniels have heart problems, and many have a truly horrific condition in which their brains are the wrong size, is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is. If the fact that dachshunds, bull terriers, beagles, basset hounds and those German shepherd dogs bred for show are freakish, unhealthy parodies of what they ought to be, and used to be, is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is. The German shepherds still used by the police are the real, healthy ones, scorned by the world of dog shows.

If the plight of most bulldogs, which now cannot mate without assistance and cannot give birth naturally, is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is. If the destruction of newborn Rhodesian ridgeback puppies because they are perfectly healthy rather than having the mild form of spina bifida required by the "breed standard" is not cruelty to animals, then nothing is. And so on, and on, and on.

As for the hysteria about attack dogs, the American pit bull terrier is bred as a family pet in its native land. And kept as such there. But we like the archetypal Middle American family, and so we should. We do not like sections of our own society, and we all know which ones. So, rather than own up, we blame it on their dogs.