We have all been watching the Press – especially the Telegraph and the Mail – get on their usual bandwagon this week, seizing on an isolated reported fox attack, making it appear like a massive conspiracy among foxes to harm humans, whipping up terror and panic, and fuelling hatred against foxes.
Most of us have seen all this before; and we know that behind the ballyhoo is a gleeful bunch of people who need foxes to be regarded as vicious predators, so they can continue to practice their vile sports. These people give themselves away on radio programmes and the like … with pitiful attempts to convince us that fox-hunting is about controlling numbers of foxes, rather than the pure sadism that it really is.
So, after a solid week of intense anti-fox babbling, the Daily Telegraph puts up a poll, to see if has managed to bully its readership into believing that foxes are vile creatures that ought to be slaughtered at will. You can see it here.
Saturday morning it looked like this … predictably confirming that many Telegraph readers actually swallowed a lot of the invective whole.
But a while later, after many non-readers of the Telegraph had tumbled what was going on, the tide seemed to be turning, with the Handsome Foxes moving ahead.
What does it all mean? Well, very little probably, except that the war is still on. And it’s a war of Good versus Evil. There are comparatively few evil people in our society, who feel a need to do cruel things. They hurt animals, they hurt children, they hurt innocent bystanders – they hurt just for the feeling that they can hurt.
The advocates of this kind of behaviour are a minority, but they have the ability to shout very loudly, because many of them are in positions of power, because they are rich, because they are major land-owners, or are in Government, in Parliament, in the Press, etc …
Society HAS progressed over the years … we no longer tolerate the burning of witches, or the keeping of slaves, or bear-baiting, and there are laws against cruelty to children, and cruelty to animals. But there is long way to go, as the perpetrators find ways to elude the law, and work constantly to try to justify their cruelty, and pervert the law and its interpretation so they can continue to enjoy their cruel pursuits. There is much work to do, to defeat the powers of Evil in our land.
Who will stand up and fight for decency?
I wonder what the statistics really say? Which animals are the most dangerous? My estimate is that, in attacks on children, MEN would come out at more than 100 times more dangerous than foxes, and certainly dogs, whose bites hospitalise 6,000 children a year, would be top of the list. Do we need to cull men, or dogs? I don’t think so. So lets start insisting on a sensible approach to relating to the animals that we are lucky enough to be able to enjoy, living around us, sharing this coming Spring.
Cheers
Bri
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