I HOPE Great Britain’s animals were tuned into the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday.
Gathered round their radios in their burrows, nests or wherever. They might have been pleasantly surprised.
The Conservative Party isn’t known for its support of animal rights.
Basically, the Tory view down the years has been chase it and then kill it. They’re not so much friends of the earth as mortal enemies of the earth.
It is a party which has had no respect whatsoever for the animals with which we share our country. That’s because, before, they simply didn’t care.
And were too anxious to please the farmers and the odious gamekeepers. And the toffs on horseback shouting tally-ho.
But maybe they’ve now changed a bit. Because in the Queen’s Speech was a clear commitment to protecting animal rights in the UK.
No more export of live animals for slaughter, for a start.
The banning of hunting trophies brought in from abroad — usually by mega-rich tossers with a weird penis-envy complex.
And the recognition that animals are — just like us — sentient. They understand stuff. They experience pleasure and pain just like the rest of us.
Anybody with a pet will confirm this for you. It’s a shame it’s taken us so long to recognise it officially.
The Government’s pledges are a good first step. But there is so much more that we can do.
For example, for too long this Government has been supporting the totally pointless and cruel culling of badgers. At the behest of some farmers. Stop it, now.
APPALLING CONDITIONS
Inoculation is the answer to bovine tuberculosis, not the mass murder of innocent animals.
Then there’s our meat industry. We have 10.6million pigs being reared for slaughter. Most in appalling conditions.
Sows held for their entire lives in a cage so small that they cannot even turn around, their teeth painfully clipped and their tails docked.
Pumped full of antibiotics because of the obscene conditions in which they are kept. The pigs killed by mass gassing.
These are intelligent animals — at least on a par with most Cabinet ministers. Let the pigs have the semblance of a natural life — being able to root around in the open.
How about a ban on all battery chickens? Or at the very least very clear labelling on eggs or chicken which have been reared in conditions worse than a concentration camp.
How about a sticker on each carton of eggs from battery hens saying: “Don’t buy these eggs. Spend 20 pence more and get some from hens which at least had a kind of life.”
We need to force our farmers to take more account of the effect they have on the environment.
We might also begin rewilding our grouse moors — an incredible eight per cent of our countryside now kept solely for the cultivation of one species.
So there’s plenty of scope, then. Nice that Boris and Co have recognised it.
The thing is, I suspect that 50 years from now we will look back on how we treated our animals with the same appalled horror we now look back on slavery.
The right to a decent life is the very least our animals should expect.
Ban a fairytale? It’s Snow joke for woke
LATEST thing to enrage the woke lunatics? Walt Disney’s Snow White.
Why? Because in the plot the Prince wakes Snow White with a kiss.
And because she was asleep at the time, it was a NON-CONSENSUAL KISS!
Ban Snow White! Ban Snow White! I think some of these people should be in a funny farm, held down by leather restraints.
