A weekly column reproduced from the Bristol Evening Post

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As you may have noticed, I don’t have a lot of time for the lentil-eating, sandal-wearing, Guardian-reading Lefties who infest the parts of Bristol where stripped pine rules.

I think they’re hypocritical, pretentious and sanctimonious. I also think that they’re usually quite harmless, apart from their nasty habit of pumping out vast quantities of methane gas and therefore doing more damage to the environment than a fleet of company Jags. It’s all those lentils, you see.

There is, however, one little group which emerges from the massed ranks of weird beards and hippy beads every now and again to threaten serious damage to the way we live. They are the animal rights loonies and they’re a very dangerous crew indeed.

Now I can’t abide cruelty to animals. Everything I kill meets its end quickly and cleanly. And if you or, more likely, your impressionable teenage daughter, decide that you don’t want to eat anything with a face, that’s up to you.

But these people aren’t content to merely live with their own prejudices. They’re hell-bent on inflicting their own perverse moral standards on the rest of us as well.

And that’s why they’ve launched an all-out campaign to shut down every laboratory in this country that uses animals for research.

Their commercial and criminal assault on Huntingdon Life Sciences and its employees is quite terrifying. Not content with firebombing staff cars and threatening families, the animal rights nutters have intimidated the gutless Royal Bank of Scotland into withdrawing a £22m loan, therefore threatening the company’s very existence.

(I trust, of course, that any of you who are customers of that bank do the decent thing and take your business elsewhere immediately.)

Luckily, the Yanks have more backbone and American financiers have come to the rescue. But why should a perfectly legitimate business, carrying out important research that could improve the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people, be driven to closure on political and ideological grounds?

Try to explain to the bunny-huggers that some of this work will actually save lives and they just look at you blankly. We’re not even talking about beagles on 20 fags a day or chimpanzees with two heads here. It’s mainly rats and mice that are used for experiments.

And anyway, if animals have rights, how come they don’t have responsibilities? Why aren’t we hauling foxes up before the courts for slaughtering chickens and lambs? Don’t they have rights too?

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