Sporran Control Lobby
Jun 25th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
The BBC web site has a story about sporrans that must be the drollest badger story this year. A sporran is a purse, often covered with badger fur and generally worn with a kilt.
I Googled badger and sporran out of curiosity. The results included military sporrans with North American badger heads. The idea of killing an American badger and mounting its head on a purse is an unspeakable perversion. Indeed, the colonial relation is a fearsome brute who likes to dine on families of ground squirrels for breakfast. However, turning him into a decoration like this is for the sorriest primitives. Surely even New Guinea tribesmen wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a dead animal’s head, purchased on mail order, with or without a sporganizer.
But the idea of DNA testing of sporrans… that is an amusing bit of righteousness, rich with comic possibilities.
It’s because nothing outrages the British quite as much as cruelty to animals. It’s an admirable sentiment in many ways, albeit with some eccentric manifestations, ranging from the dotty to the dangerous.
Since the recent award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie British journalists have been lecturing outraged, flag-burning muslims that Britain is a free country, entitled to give awards to whomsoever it choses. Alas, this is poppycock. The “establishment” didn’t dare give an award to the distinguished scientist Colin Blakemore and, cravenly, still hasn’t done so. That’s because Britain’s animal rights fascists are a lot scarier than Al Qaeda and the Taleban and all of their ilk combined.
The most satisfying explanation I’ve seen of the decision to give Rushdie an award was not that the flag-burners were anticipated and dismissed, but that they were simply not expected. Which is to say that all of their past protests made no lasting impression. If 9/11 had been an attack on Crufts it might be a different story. Or maybe not.
