Obersturmbannführer Nutkin

Three things I know to be eternally true and proper guides to seeking the good life:

1. It does not make her bum look fat.

2. Someone’s already tried to break it – whatever it may be.

3. There’s no peace of mind or rest for the soul to be found in any sentence that contains the word accordion.

There's also a fourth, and though I may be starting to sound like someone with a manifesto here it’s still worth noting:

4. By their death wishes shall ye know them.

Look at these passages about squirrel culling.

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

Their raids on bird tables have made them a public enemy to some, but the grey squirrel's apparently relentless conquest of Britain may now be over.

Naturalists and landowners are joining forces today in a drive to effectively wipe out the grey squirrel from northern Scotland. It is believed to be the largest cull of a mammal yet seen in the UK, with many tens of thousands of grey squirrels expected to be trapped and killed under the government-sponsored project and shot on sight, legally, by landowners.

Facts from the Telegraph: natural history advisers to the Postman Pat franchise. A cull of at least 20,000 grey squirrels has led to red squirrels making a comeback in many areas of the country, conservationists have said.

Large-scale trapping and shooting of greys began at the start of last year. Most has been carried out in the north of England, the last main bastion of red squirrels south of the Scottish border.

The cull has been criticised by groups like the RSPCA, but those behind it say that their controversial methods are working and that sightings of red squirrels are now increasing. The claim comes as conservationists are planning to create two further "havens" for reds, on the Isles of Scilly and near Ullapool in the western Highlands of Scotland

Last week, it emerged that red squirrel numbers on the island of Anglesey, North Wales, had doubled after a pioneering project which saw the removal of more than 7,000 greys. Many conservationists believe controlling the population of greys is the only way to save the red.

The Government-funded Red Squirrel Protection Partnership (RSPP) says it has killed more than 18,000 greys since January 2007, chiefly in Northumberland. At least 2,000 more have been killed in Cumbria over the same period, while "unofficial" culls are thought to have taken the total number killed far higher.

This is how the Scottish Wildlife Trust describes this process on its website.

Our project aims for the next three years are to:

protect existing red squirrel populations in the Highlands, Argyll, North-East Scotland and northern Tayside

improve and share our knowledge and understanding of squirrel management

increase the involvement of private foresters and woodland owners in conservation efforts for red squirrels

increase our knowledge of the distribution of squirrels in Scotland and maintain a process for recording and disseminating this information

promote the project to the public

The red squirrel needs as much help as possible if it is to survive in Scotland for the future. The amount of funding available to save the squirrel will be a deciding factor on what the project can achieve. Our activities will buy more time for our red friend as we try to ensure red squirrels are part of Scotland's future. Donate NOW and help save red squirrels!

Hoots mon. Talk about the banality of evil. Ein Skwirrel. Ein High Road. Ein Furrier.

And there’s even a heart-warming and cheerful Jamie Oliver moment for all those foodies out there from the Guardian.

A pest controller on a mission to rid the UK of grey squirrels is moving south - to feed the demand for squirrel pie.

Paul Parker, 45, has helped catch and kill more than 22,000 grey squirrels in the past 18 months.

Parker, from Newcastle, said: "We are hoping to move down south. We have asked landowners down there if they need any help to get rid of the greys, to educate them as to our methods and how we catch them, using spring loaded box traps and catch live traps."

"I cannot personally get enough of these grey squirrels, people are eating them. If I was getting a hundred, they would take a hundred each and every day, the demand is so high. They are sold as soon as they hit the counter," he added.

"They are going to top restaurants, butchers, the working man. They are a delicacy and they are really hard to get - especially up this neck of the woods."

For decades the greys, imported from the US by landowners in the 1870s, have slowly spread across the UK, out-muscling red squirrels in their search for food. Already suffering from a loss of their favoured woodlands, red squirrel numbers have plummeted.

Parker said: "Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not. They are destructive because they don't belong here; there is no place for them."

Yum, yum!

Now look.

I’m a vegetarian solely because Mrs. Northwester is concerned about animal welfare herself and she never even once as much as hinted she might want me to stop eating meat and you don’t let that kind of respect go unthanked. I personally have no problems with other people hunting or raising animals to kill and eat. And it’s also true that many people perceive the grey squirrel to be a pest that’s extinguishing the ‘native’ red squirrel, and I have no problems with killing pests on the one hand and conserving wildlife on the other. Go for it.

It’s just… Well, given how often and in how many different ways and places our enemies are trying and succeeding to mess up the world, I think it may be worthwhile to see what’s going on here. It’s the small details that can sometimes give us the key to victory, such as the discovery of the smallpox vaccine.

There’s so much to choose from.

First: Class

Here’s the Guardian and a State-sponsored, i.e., government-run ‘nature’ organisation involved in the mass killing of small furry animals. 20,000 dead and counting. They are being shot and trapped by individuals, and on behalf of a quango, that the Guardian approves of.

Would anyone like to guess what the Guardian piece would be like if the hapless greys were being hunted from horseback in southern England, to the merry sounds of the gentry enjoying themselves? Hmm?

Still and all, how about aristocratic landowners and cash-strapped farmers getting Peers and Japanese businessmen in to hunt or trap the Grey Peril. Instant approval from the bien-pensants from Islington to the Scottish Parliament, from Fylingdales to Faslane?

I also like to speculate what its reaction to any purely private effort on behalf of commercial farmers to cull badgers to protect livestock from bovine TB might be, Liberalverse-wide…

And I love this;

They are going to top restaurants, butchers, the working man.

The cultural Left doesn’t object to ‘top restaurants’ any more because they are the core of the political class and so they can afford them, but now that most beloved of the Left’s species designated as groups of special scientific interest - the working man - gets a seat at the table and so we must approve. If the horny-handed sons of labour can tuck into Tufty with impunity then only a boor or a bigot could object.

Second: Race.

Scots and Geordies; WWF-protected Northern mammals up to their armpits in the blood of formerly squeaky fluffballs are portrayed as official Heroes Of Environmental Production, and as such it’s all well and good, but I can’t help but wonder if – you know – the traditional squirrel hunters of some other country were being interviewed and portrayed by the cultural Left there might be mention of indiscriminate fire-power, a certain type of religion, perhaps: and the effects of the squirrel-hunters’ attitude on prospects for World Peace.

Played for laughs, there’d be banjos for sure.

Oh, and this:

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

You can just hear String of Pearls and In the Mood in the background there can’t you?

Third: Mysticism.

“Parker said: "Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not….they don't belong here; there is no place for them.”

You know, as a soppy tree-hugger myself I’ve got to admit to awed admiration for this fellow’s chutzpah.

Red squirrels are mystical?

Okay, so there was Ratatosk who ran up and down the Norse World Tree conveying insults between the eagle at the top and the entropic dragon at the roots. And as an alternative cosmic image to the Big Bang, the Little Bang, the Expanding Universe (let alone any unseemly messing around with turtles or eggs) I’ve long felt that the arrival of a breathless squirrel at the eyrie and gasping out the words of Níðhöggr to the effect of ‘Your mother!’ was at least a colourful metaphor.

Perhaps Parker has a throwing-axe collection, a squirrel-skin coat, and maybe even a nice shiny helmet.

Red squirrels are mystical?

Is Parker a Jedi and thus can see a kernel of the Force in Nutkin’s huge supply of midichlorians? And if greys don’t belong here and there’s no place for them, do they thus truly have to die? Or just, like, go back to Roswell or the Mother Ship or something? The Guardian doesn’t seem to care.

Now, if I was interviewed by the Guardian and I suggested that native British animals were A) beautiful, B) mystical, and C) that the ‘non-native’ ones didn’t belong here, I expect that the Guardian would find it necessary to mention my politics and views on immigration and at the very least refer to my flaxen hair and crazed blue eyes. But the liberal paper of choice seems to relish all this death here. Paul Parker seems to have the key to the liberal killing-with-conscience-cupboard almost as if he has super powers or something.Paul Parker...

Paul Parker? Say, you don’t think…?

Fourth: official dishonesty.

Our activities will buy more time for our red friend as we try to ensure red squirrels are part of Scotland's future. Donate NOW and help save red squirrels!

Translation into English from modern charity-speak; ‘Please send more cash as we need to kill more damn Yankee greys, but we’re just too White Heather Club to mention the killing bit.

You don’t need to know anyway.

You can’t handle the truth.

What is truth?’

Fifth: Darwinianism.

They are bigger, stronger and carry a pox that is deadly to their smaller cousins.

The claim comes as conservationists are planning to create two further "havens" for reds.

"Red squirrels are such a beautiful, mystical little creature. The greys are not. They are destructive because they don't belong here; there is no place for them."

Hey, what happened to the Survival Of The Fittest? To Natural Selection?

The Guardian is Britain’s lead singer in the choir of the First Church of Darwin. So what happened to the argument that goes: since Nature terminates so many pregnancies anyway, what’s all the hoo-har about the NHS doing what comes naturally too?

And if the Reds can’t compete in the wild against the grey, why not just let the Great Mother do her stuff and send Rocky where the dodos went?

I can understand conserving something scarce and endangered on the grounds of its beauty and to preserve bio-diversity - or to put it in an old-fashioned way to respect God’s creation - and also because you never know when Scrat’s DNA might be needed to cure AIDS of to halt Global Warming or something.

But who gets to give the order Bring me the head of Patterwig?

I guess you have to join the special club to learn the secret code to the power of choosing life and death.

The liberal Left’s taste in death differs from the social Right’s.

Boy, does it ever.

The Left favours the deaths of Israeli farmers and wedding-guests and anonymous children (because they never see the light of day); whereas the Right nominates those who deliberately bomb civilians as their target of choice, Afghan ‘wedding-guests’ or those who kill or otherwise deliberately hurt children for the Reaper’s services. We’re funny that way.

To be fair to the Left, they’re very keen on avenging the deaths at Israeli hands of Palestinian children – but only the ones killed by Israeli ordnance – they go all vague about the ones given delivery rounds that don’t involve pizza or newspapers. I suppose it’s considered fair payback to the Right for merely expressing grief once or twice per column or post for IDF-made children’s’ deaths when we point out that these Palestinian children have a tendency to cluster around mortar positions, rocket-launchers, and to mingle voluntarily with armed 'militants'. Good thing we get the blame for that, I suppose.)

So what’s the purpose in pointing these squirrely things out? Well, in the culture wars I have been taught that it’s vital to keep the score between the social left and the cultural Right. ‘Only compare’, as the great Theodore Dalrymple says. Think of it as intel combined with esprit de corps to make a weapon.

Thanatological preferences are a good guide to where conservatives differ from liberals.

Picture from American Israeli Patriot.