YOU and your grandmother headed down to the park, hand-in-hand, to murder countless waterfowl. Add it to the list of your crimes:
Keeping a hamster as a classroom pet
You are imprisoned by the cruellest captors imaginable – bored eight-year-olds. When not waking you from your day’s rest by poking unwashed fingers through your bars, they blind you with camera flashes. You spend all day running on your wheel, dreaming of freedom.
Leaving out a saucer of milk for a hedgehog
Come on kids! Gather at the kitchen window, just as the sun is setting, and look out into the garden. If you stay very still and keep very quiet, you might just see spiny Mrs Tiggy-Winkle contracting lethal, lactose-induced diarrhoea. There! Isn’t nature marvellous?
Feeding the ducks
Throwing stale bread for the ducks, giggling in happiness, shouting the word ‘duck!’ which was one of the first in your vocabulary. Bread of so negligible nutrional value it kills them with malnutrition while filling their lake with algae and attracting killer rats. To the ducks you were the great destroyer, harbinger of death.
Donkey rides
50p for a ride on the donkey? The donkey that, you fondly imagined, was treated well for the service it provided? Until you were old enough to do the basic maths and observe the seaside economy and realised what a life of misery you’d contributed to?
Going to the zoo
‘No! Zoos are ethical now! They do a lot of conservation work!’ Oh please. Zoos are prisons where every convict is innocent. The lions are bored and depressed. The meerkats have to listen to Compare the Meerkat accents all day. The gorillas dream of breaking through the glass and tearing you limb from limb. The pandas are too sad to shag.
Dressing your dog in a Halloween costume
The one benefit of being a dog is not having to wear clothes. Don’t take that away from them.
