Tally ho! The Tories are coming!

The RSPCA recently drew attention to the alarming rise in dog-fighting in the UK. A report on the BBC website includes news about one fight in a Mill Hill park. Of course, the sort of people doing this are largely assumed to be working-class yobs. An RSPCA spokesperson explains:

"It's a lot to do with the sort of MTV gang culture - people want to look hard, they want to look tough, with a dog that looks tough."

I wrote a blog about this back in July and I think it is sad and a damning indictment of the sort of society that we are/have become.

But exploiting dogs' natural, aggressive instincts for sport is not confined to the working classes, of course. News comes that David Cameron's Tories would repeal the ban on fox hunting with dogs, if they form the next government. See, for example, this nice partisan report on the Daily Mirror website.

Of course, there are many differences between a bunch of brutalised working-class idiots setting their dogs on each other in a park, which we all condemn, and a bunch of aristos or nouveau-riches galloping after a pack of hounds after a fox, which some of us regard as a noble pastime and part of the indissoluble social glue of rural life. That is, setting aside class double-standards, when it comes down to it, there is no difference at all.

Here is my favourite militant vegan punk band Active Slaughter with their song "Born Free" and an upsetting video reminding us why it is right that fox-hunting is banned and why that ban should be enforced.