Well, thank the Lord there were no cctv cameras around when I caught Mr Tibbles in my garden a few weeks back, before the whole furore began. Luckily, I read about Mary Bale and surreptitiously took down the mini-gibbet and buried the remains in a small trench behind the pond, before the Facebook maniacs had a chance to get on the case.
The cat had been doing its usual stuff — crapping on the lawn, eating wild animals, urinating in my daughter’s sandpit — before it was unfortunately snagged in the wooden peg and wire snare I had laid by the hedge. It was subjected to a brief trial, of the sort you might receive in Cuba or Burma, before being marched to the centre of the garden swinging by its back legs and subjected to due process: I even put a suit on for the event and sang a brief requiem, by Fauré. I swear there were two woodmice sitting nearby knitting as the sentence was carried out, cackling away to themselves. Declining in numbers are woodmice, so a rare moment of cheer for them.
A day or so later I noticed a little paper ad pinned to the trees along the road asking if anyone had seen Mr Tibbles and with a number to ring if we had. There was a photo of Tibbles playing with a ball of string, but it didn’t do him justice. Oh, I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him, dear neighbour — and if you had kept control of him, he wouldn’t be in the place he is now: he would be crapping in your garden instead. Maybe I should let my almost-teenage son clamber from garden to garden, taking a ‘dump’ (as he would describe the act) wherever he pleased, firing air-rifle potshots at the nuthatches from the centre of each lawn and sinuously rubbing his body up against female houseguests. ‘It’s only natural for them, you know,’ I would tell the outraged homeowners. ‘They’re wild animals. Can’t change their nature. Wouldn’t be fair to them.’ God, I loathe domesticated cats, or more properly the people who own them: more of them let loose every year, 120 million wild animals and birds killed every 12 months as a consequence — but the wildlife people will say nothing about it because they do not wish to offend.
Mary Bale, meanwhile, is the excellent bank clerk from Coventry who put a cat in a wheelie bin and was unfortunately caught on cctv so doing. She saw it sitting on a wall, stroked it and then dumped it in the bin and closed the lid. Maybe people were cross because she put it in the wrong bin, in which case the council is to blame. They should have bins for paper, plastic and tin cans, another one for vegetable peelings and a third one for itinerant cats, all destined for recycling. It would be nice to spread a cat on your garden in the knowledge it would be doing some good for a change.
Anyway, as a result Mrs Bale has been subjected to the most astonishing vilification; websites, especially on that idiot’s mouthbox Facebook, have been set up demanding she be killed. Yes, killed. There was a Death To Mary Bale site which has now been withdrawn after one or two legal questions were asked of Facebook and a whole bunch of other Facebook sites demanding she be brought to justice, or worse. ‘Burn this bitch till she diiiiiiies,’ I read on one. ‘F***ing throw her in the river.’ My favourite post came from a chap called James Edwards, who said the following: ‘I dont know how pple can put so much hate into a cat i mean in this day and age well world we have murders rapists pedos pple going round boming countrys and everyone wants to hate a fucking cat?????’
The magazine Private Eye does a very funny occasional column parodying the comments left on online chatsites — but it does not come close to the level of the stuff which you can read everyday, written by people in all seriousness, people who have an intellectual capacity well below that of even cats. This truly is the moronic inferno. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to the many and various sites dedicated to killing, imprisoning, tracking down and prosecuting Mary Bale, to the extent that she now needs police protection paid for by you and me. They will need to provide police protection for the sniggering oaf of a woman who threw some puppies into a fast-flowing river and was filmed doing so. They’re out to get her too — she apparently lives in Bosnia, where there is not much to do other than throw puppies into rivers.
What is remarkable is the reaction of the press and the authorities to this sort of thing, this psychotic fury engendered in the minds of utter simpletons. A few thousand sign up to one or other fascistic Facebook site calling for someone to be sacked, punished, killed, or whatever — and the press thinks this matters and runs it as a story, presuming that the imbeciles who sign up to this stuff matter, or are of consequence, or should be taken seriously. Nick Clegg and the RSPCA have both responded to the Facebook campaigns against Mary Bale, with Nick intoning very seriously how he ‘understands’ the ‘passion for animal welfare’ of the British people, and the RSPCA insisting that they will press charges. Hell, during the election campaign even Gordon Brown signed up to do an interview with the vacuous halfwits of Mumsnet; presumably in the name of modernity and democracy and some horribly misguided attempt to reach out to ‘real’ people.
But it isn’t democracy, really, and they are certainly not real people, if by that you mean representative of the rest of us. It is the witterings of people who are, for the most part, deranged or at best extremely thick. Brown got his comeuppance when his answer to the crucial question ‘what is your favourite biscuit?’ received what the mumsnet hags thought an inadequate answer. The result was a front-page story. And yet we all know that these people do not really matter.
I suppose I am going to have to set up my own Facebook site called Free Mary Bale, and see how many people sign up.
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