Human Events reports that the British Labour Party had managed to identify and serve the ultimate left constituency: the invertebrates.

But all this goes beyond jokes, liberal politicians in America, too, are working hand-in-glove with Animal Rights extremists to introduce covertly in the guise of animal welfare protection a range of artful provisions subjecting pet owners to warrant-free supervision by self-appointed animal guardians and erecting a regime of expensive and impractical care requirements that would eliminate private dog breeding and the keeping of packs of hounds.

Yes, it really is now a criminal offense in Britain to abuse an ant, a worm, a slug, cockroach, a scorpion, a stick insect or whatever creature you care to name. The moment you decide to keep it as a pet you are obliged by our Animal Welfare Act to take full account of its welfare needs — or face a $30,000 fine or a twelve-month prison sentence.

And if you think cockroach rights sound crazy, wait till you hear how the law applies to the way you keep your dog or your cat. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) — one of the numerous, busybody branches of our socialist New Labour administration — recently issued guidelines to pet owners clarifying the law.

You risk prosecution if:

— You fail to groom your long-haired dog or cat once a day.

— You feed your dog from the table.

— You use your hands or feet when playing with your cat (as this may encourage aggressive behavior).

— You fail to provide every cat in your household with its own litter tray (even if the cat has access to a garden).

— You try to make your cat vegetarian by denying it meat.

None of these provisions is in itself a criminal offense, a DEFRA spokesman has explained helpfully. But failure to comply with several of them “may be used in evidence to support a prosecution for animal cruelty.”

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

A lot of Americans were delighted to hear that, once Barack Obama was elected, absolutely everyone would be getting exactly the same kind of health care enjoyed by US senators. If you believed that, you need to talk to me about this bridge I have for sale.

Today’s Daily Mail has a story illustrating how government-provided health services really work: by rationing.

Thousands of patients with terminal cancer were dealt a blow last night after a decision was made to deny them life prolonging drugs.

The Government’s rationing body said two drugs for advanced breast cancer and a rare form of stomach cancer were too expensive for the NHS.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is expected to confirm guidance in the next few weeks that will effectively ban their use.

The move comes despite a pledge by Nice to be more flexible in giving life-extending drugs to terminally-ill cancer patients after a public outcry last year over ‘death sentence’ decisions. Leading campaigners last night said Nice had failed the ‘acid test’ of whether it really intended to give new priority to people with just a few months to live.

One drug, Lapatinib, can halve the speed of growth of breast cancer in one in five women with an aggressive form of the disease.

Dr Gillian Leng, Nice deputy chief executive, said ‘The committee concluded that Lapatinib is not a cost-effective use of NHS resources when compared with current treatment.’

Up to 1,500 stomach cancer patients also face a ban on Sutent – the only drug that can extend their lives.

Lt. Gen. H.G. Martin, in his memoir of soldiering and sport in pre-War British India, Sunset From the Main (1951), recalls an unpleasant encounter on angling expedition to the Simla Hills in search of mahseer.

The steep path dropped down to the bed of the gorge past brakes of thorn and matted evergreen and across unexpected lawns where the encircling cactus reared its knotted candleabras, rigid and grotesque as submarine coral-beds. In these occasional clearings troops of brown monkeys basked, scratching in the sunshine: plebeian monkeys, vulgar, thieving, shameless, who lowered and gibbered as we passed. I do not love the brown monkey. Who has ever seen him look pleasant? A typical, politically minded proletarian, he has the Communist’s capacity for hating all creation.

Llewellyn in 1979

The British Press pays admiring tribute to Sir Dai Lewellyn, who died younger than most, not from the years but the mileage.

Evening Standard:

One-time debs’ delight Sir Dai Llewellyn, who has died aged 62, never did anything remotely useful in his career. Defying every known rule of moderation, he simply lived life to the full – and that cheered up a lot of people.

The Telegraph:

The 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation reflected in soubriquets such as “Seducer of the Valleys”, “Conquistador of the Canapé Circuit”, “Dai ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’ Llewellyn” or simply “Dirty Dai”.

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry “Foxhunter” Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret’s one-time paramour Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of “It” girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his outrageous indiscretions. …

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while “attempting to roger a girl called Nettie”, the girlfriend of a friend. “I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident,” he told a journalist.

Daily Mail:

Sir Dai, wracked by cancer, cirrhosis of the liver and anaemia, died in a Kent hospital where he had been receiving treatment for several weeks.

His death leaves a gap in London society that will be hard, if not impossible, to fill. Sir Dai was defined by a recklessness that belongs to another age.

He was 62, a child of the post-war era, but he lived like an Edwardian rake, strutting the boulevards with a wicked smile, never too far from another drink or a beautiful woman. …

As a young man, Sir Dai pursued a modelling career under the name David Savage.

Nicky Haslam, the interior designer and writer said: ‘When I first met Dai he was incredibly good-looking and well dressed. The girls fell for him like mad.’

Sir Dai assisted the process with relentless flattery and assiduous attention, but he always maintained that women loved a rascal, especially those who make them laugh.

But it didn’t work on one young beauty who, it is said, was the love of his life. …

His modelling career flopped and when he arrived back in London, two years later, she had married someone else.

Sir Dai threw himself with even more enthusiasm into the life that came to characterise him: parties, drinking and seduction.

Some detected a Celtic self-destructive streak and he was indeed a child of the valleys.

In an interview at the hospice last November he said he once drank eight bottles of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of port and a bottle of vodka in one night, yet in the morning he was perfectly lucid.

It was a tale that will pursue him to the grave.

——————————-

Hat tip to John Brewer.

Cheers as the hunt goes out in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire

Some day Britain’s contemptible Labour Government will fall and the petty tyranny of its Hunting Ban, passed via the overthrow of the British Constitution and the usurpation of the authority of both houses of Parliament by a temporary majority in the House of the Commons, will end.

In the meantime, persecution of rural traditions and sport has backfired on the Left, awakening a new political consciousness and determination on the part of their victims. Hunting is stronger than ever in Britain.

Daily Mail:

Record numbers turned out for the Boxing Day hunts yesterday – adding fresh fuel to criticisms of the ‘ban’ introduced under Labour.

More than 300,000 people converged on the countryside to take part in or cheer on the annual events across England, Wales and Scotland.

Pro-hunt groups used the turnout to renew calls to repeal the controversial 2004 Hunting Act, backed by a petition with thousands of signatures and Conservative plans to end the ban. …

More than 300 hunts, including 194 fox hunts with packs of hounds, were held yesterday, according to the Countryside Alliance. More than 6,000 turned out for one in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

The majority used ‘trails’ in which a scent of the quarry is laid down artificially. A dead fox is often used as a reward for hounds at the hunt’s end.

But many took advantage of exemptions, including around 50 which used the ‘bird of prey’ exemption.

This involves a fox being flushed out by hounds into the path of a bird of prey. Many hunts now have their own eagle owl or golden eagle.

Other hunts use an exemption in which two dogs flush out quarry from woodland for shooting. …

A petition launched last week to repeal the ‘confusing, unnecessary and divisive’ Act has already gathered 7,700 signatures, the Countryside Alliance said.

Spokesman Tim Bonner added: ‘We believe that the evidence of the last four years is that the Hunting Act has just failed in every possible term.

‘It does no good at all for animals’ welfare, is a huge cost of police time, and puts innocent people at risk of prison.’

Mr Bonner claimed a low turnout of protesters yesterday was due to them being ‘drowned out’ by supporters in recent years.

The Hunting Act was controversially passed using the Parliament Act, which meant the approval of the House of Lords – which wanted to regulate hunting with dogs – was not needed. …

It came into effect in England and Wales in February 2005 and followed a ban in Scotland introduced two years earlier.

The Act was brought in to outlaw the hunting of foxes, as well as deer, hares and mink with dogs, as well as organised hare coursing.

But opponents have argued against it on grounds including there was no evidence of cruelty and it provided a means of controlling animals numbers.

Tory leader David Cameron has said he will offer a free vote on the matter if he becomes prime minister.

Read the whole thing.

FoxNews:

Archaeologists have found what they say is the oldest brain ever discovered in Britain, or at least the shriveled remnant of one, in a decapitated skull that dates back more than 2,000 years.

Inside the skull, the scientists found “a yellow substance which scans showed to be shrunken, but brain-shaped,” according to a University of York statement.

“I’m amazed and excited that scanning has shown structures which appear to be unequivocally of brain origin,” said Philip Duffey, a neurologist at York Hospital who scanned the skull. …

The skull was found in a muddy pit unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York’s campus expansion at Heslington East and is thought to have been a ritual offering. Nobody is sure how the brain remained preserved for so long. …

York Archaeological Trust dig team member Rachel Cubitt reached in and, while she cleaned the soil-covered skull’s outer surface, “she felt something move inside the cranium. Peering through the base of the skull, she spotted an unusual yellow substance.”

“The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,” said Sonia O’Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford. “This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K., and one of the earliest worldwide.”

Daily Mail:

Archaeologists have found Britain’s oldest surviving human brain in a field where it was buried 2,000 years ago during the Iron Age.

It was discovered inside a decapitated skull placed in a small pit near York.

Researchers studying the remains believe they could be from a human sacrifice…

Dr Richard Hall, director of archaeology at the York Archaeological Trust, said: ‘From the size, it was probably an adult but we can’t say whether it was a man or woman.

There is no obvious cause of death because the skull is still intact.

‘The skull must have been removed from the body.

‘We are confident that the skull was buried in this small pit and that it has lain undisturbed since the Iron Age.’

Dr Hall added: ‘It is possible that a living person has been killed and their (sic) head put into a pit for some religious purpose.’

Darker material near the top is the shrunken brain

Richard Munday, in the London Times, observes that citizens of modern democracies are typically less safe in the event of terrorist attack today than they were a century ago in gas-lit London when policemen carried only a truncheon and ordinary citizens were allowed to own and carry weapons.

For anybody who still believed in it, the Mumbai shootings exposed the myth of “gun control”. India had some of the strictest firearms laws in the world, going back to the Indian Arms Act of 1878, by which Britain had sought to prevent a recurrence of the Indian Mutiny.

The guns used in last week’s Bombay massacre were all “prohibited weapons” under Indian law, just as they are in Britain. In this country we have seen the irrelevance of such bans (handgun crime, for instance, doubled here within five years of the prohibition of legal pistol ownership), but the largely drug-related nature of most extreme violence here has left most of us with a sheltered awareness of the threat. We have not yet faced a determined and broad-based attack.

The Mumbai massacre also exposed the myth that arming the police force guarantees security. Sebastian D’Souza, a picture editor on the Mumbai Mirror who took some of the dramatic pictures of the assault on the Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station, was angered to find India’s armed police taking cover and apparently failing to engage the gunmen.

In Britain we might recall the prolonged failure of armed police to contain the Hungerford killer, whose rampage lasted more than four hours, and who in the end shot himself. In Dunblane, too, it was the killer who ended his own life: even at best, police response is almost always belated when gunmen are on the loose. …

The Mumbai massacre could happen in London tomorrow; but probably it could not have happened to Londoners 100 years ago.

In January 1909 two such anarchists, lately come from an attempt to blow up the president of France, tried to commit a robbery in north London, armed with automatic pistols. Edwardian Londoners, however, shot back – and the anarchists were pursued through the streets by a spontaneous hue-and-cry. The police, who could not find the key to their own gun cupboard, borrowed at least four pistols from passers-by, while other citizens armed with revolvers and shotguns preferred to use their weapons themselves to bring the assailants down.

Today we are probably more shocked at the idea of so many ordinary Londoners carrying guns in the street than we are at the idea of an armed robbery. But the world of Conan Doyle’s Dr Watson, pocketing his revolver before he walked the London streets, was real. The arming of the populace guaranteed rather than disturbed the peace.

That armed England existed within living memory; but it is now so alien to our expectations that it has become a foreign country.

The Belfast Telegraph reports an unusual case of self defence in the United Kingdom.

A grandfather today told how he fought off masked men wielding Samurai swords as they tried to rob his post office.

The two balaclava-wearing intruders took turns at slashing Alan Garratt with the three-foot long weapons at the Leicestershire branch, he said.

But they fled empty-handed after the 68-year-old, who had previously undergone surgery for a triple heart bypass, fought back with a sherry bottle.

The raid was captured on a CCTV camera, which was installed after a burglary at the post office, in Knipton, Leicestershire, just days earlier.

Mr Garratt needed eight stitches in his left arm after Monday evening’s attack.

He told the Leicester Mercury: “I don’t think they thought anyone would tackle them.

“I didn’t really feel it when I was cut on the arm and hand until afterwards. There was blood everywhere.

“The only thing I could find to arm myself with was a bottle of sherry.

0:33 video from security camera.

The Exmoor Foxhounds

The Telegraph reports that turnout at this year’s opening meets and sales at hunt-oriented businesses are booming, despite the Labour Party’s Hunt Ban.

Part of the hunting boom is attributable to sportsmen’s success in devising ways of working around the Ban, such as a more realistic kind of drag hunting termed “trail hunting,” but resistance to the Ban is also a factor.

As the season gallops into action on Saturday, William Little finds that the post-ban hunting world is booming.

According to the Countryside Alliance, there has been a 10 per cent increase in people who pay full subscription – ie go out every week or more.

This represents an increase of 5,000 people on the number that hunted before the fox ban. On Boxing Day, popular with fair-weather riders, an estimated 30,000 more people take part than before the ban.

There is also anecdotal evidence to suggest a considerable increase in the number of people who follow hunts in cars and on foot. …

Instead of the law causing the demise of hunting and its supporting trades, such as farriers and liveries, the upsurge in newcomers has brought a rural economic boom.

Jenny McCarthy posts dispatches from the front lines of Britain’s class war.

The old-fashioned stereotype of a Tory used to be someone “very fat, very lazy, and very clever,” someone rather like Evelyn Waugh. But embonpoint today is looked upon in Britain, not as an indication of access to good dining and fine wine, but as a sure indicator of indiscipline and low achievement. Basically, Britain’s elite is today firmly Puritan, at least with respect to body image.

Jeremy Clarkson… wrote last week of his experiences driving the new Rolls-Royce coupé around town: “It’s been a genuinely alarming insight into the bitterness of Britain’s obese and stupid underclass.”

When he drove past a bus queue, he said, he realised that “hate is something you can touch and see and smell.”

The “obese and stupid” people at the bus stop hadn’t done anything specific, it seemed: presumably they had simply failed to light up with sufficient admiration as Clarkson coasted by in his swanky car.

Still, you don’t have to be Karl Marx to reflect that if you were waiting for a bus while fretting about the rising cost of heating the family home, the sudden appearance of Clarkson in a £296,500 vehicle might not fill the heart with unalloyed joy.

In July, the Sunday Times and Spectator columnist Rod Liddle saw a fat woman and her plump children in a supermarket.

She didn’t say or do anything discourteous, it appeared, nor did the children, but the mere glimpse of “this hag”, her “vile lardy brood” and the contents of her shopping trolley prompted the writer to a bizarre rant which culminated in the fantasy that “I set the fat mother on fire with my Zippo lighter, and on the way out I kicked the smallest fat child hard in the gut.”

It is worth pointing out that while both Clarkson and Liddle are normal-looking men, neither would exactly be in line to win the Weight Watchers Slimmer of the Year Award. But then middle-class fat is, for them, texturally different from underclass fat. Good things have poured into middle-class fat, you see: steak, Roquefort, red wine and a heartily robust enjoyment of life. Underclass fat, however, being composed entirely of chicken nuggets, chips and wilful idleness, is a mark of moral degeneracy.

The people who are quickest to sneer at “chavs” and the perceived physical shortcomings of the “underclass” often seem to be those most obsessed with flaunting their own “bling” and extending their unprovoked rudeness to those with far less social and financial clout. Odd, that. It does sometimes leave you wondering, though, just what the term “to behave with class” really means.

The interior-linked anti-obesity rants are hilarious.

Urbanista Amanda Platell takes to the moors for one of those journalistic visiting the rustic primitives who shoot think pieces, and finds the shooting sports and the pursuit of the red grouse nothing like what she expected.

Like many townies, my prejudices about the Glorious Twelfth were well and truly fully formed. The official start of the shooting season was nothing more than an ancient ritual to massacre thousands of defenceless birds.

The killers were a bunch of men with Prince Charles cut-crystal accents looking down their long aristocratic noses at ordinary folk like me, city folk, you know, the kind who have to buy their own furniture. Their dogs would have better pedigrees than me.

So it was with some cynicism and not a little trepidation that I agreed to take part in the Glorious Twelfth last Tuesday, the traditional start of the shooting season, on a moor on the Durham/ Northumberland border. …

Odd, isn’t it, that we city dwellers feel squeamish at the thought of an animal being bred and ultimately shot in the wild, yet feel no pangs over the battery chickens or pigs raised in appalling conditions for our table.

But I wanted to put my prejudices to the test and, more importantly, to try better to understand the problems facing our beleaguered countryside, bled dry by a government that neither knows nor cares about voters outside of their urban heartlands.

The Daily Mail does a fine job of demonstrating just how clueless it is, illustrating a red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) shooting article with a nice picture of a capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), and identifying a picture of a shooter aiming a great big over-and-under shotgun as the “traditional image” simply because the man in the picture is wearing tweeds. Amanda’s side-by-side double is, of course, far more traditional. Nobody cares about waxed cotton versus tweed.

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Submerged in recent times, there was in the Mesolithic period a land bridge connecting Britain with the continent. Fishermen working the Dogger Banks have pulled up prehistoric human artifacts in their nets, and archaeologists consequently named the sunken landscape once thick with human settlement Doggerland. Efforts at mapping Doggerland are currently underway.

Nature News:

Doggerland is key to understanding the Mesolithic in northern Europe,” says Vince Gaffney, a landscape archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Along with his colleagues Simon Fitch and the late Ken Thomson, Gaffney established the mapping project to outline the terrain of Doggerland, named after the sandbank and shipping hazard of the Dogger Bank (see ‘Mesolithic sites around the North Sea’). They managed to borrow seismic survey data, which outline sediment layers below the seabed, from the Norwegian oil company Petroleum Geo-Services. The researchers then put their powerful computers to work to reconstruct Doggerland in three dimensions.

In a pilot project beginning in 2002, the researchers reconstructed 6,000 square metres of the ancient landscape — slightly larger than a football field. There, about 10 metres beneath the modern seabed, they discovered the course of a major ancient river, almost as big as today’s Rhine. They named it the Shotton River, after Birmingham geologist Fred Shotton who, among other things, was dropped behind enemy lines to map the geology of the Normandy beaches before the D-Day landings. Now confident that the reconstruction would work, the researchers expanded the project. The result is a 23,000-square-kilometre map of a part of Doggerland — an area the size of Wales — that they hope eventually to extend northward as well as eastward, towards the Netherlands.