Boxing Day fame
The RSPCA is looking into claims made by a prominent lawyer that he killed a fox with a baseball bat.
Jolyon Maugham posted on Twitter on Thursday morning: “Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?”
The animal welfare charity tweeted that the claim was “distressing”.
Which is so sad because he meant it to be funny. Jokes are such a personal thing.
Government guidelines state you can use cage traps and snares to catch foxes and you must “humanely kill any fox you catch while it’s in the trap or snare”.
Humanely doesn’t mean “with a baseball bat.”
Well, at least he had the decency to not wrap the bat in barbed wire first.
The chickens will end up being ‘prominent lawyer’ dung anyway, so why the need to protect them? I think it’s simply bloodlust, the chickens will be killed, the fox will be killed, lots and lots of killing so the ‘prominent lawyer’ can sustain itself. Bragging about it on twitter is bizarre, did you expect us to applaud you? Did you think young girls would swoon? What a demented moron. All you did was reinforce my already formidable misanthropy, especially toward ‘prominent lawyers’.
The one that struck me was in the responses to his “sorry, not-sorry” tweet –
https://twitter.com/YARDODOG/status/1210201292620087296
So, this dude brings up that he found cubs under the choir seat in church, and he’s mentioning that in support of his approval of clubbing a fox to death. Aren’t we all glad to be atheists?
It was an extraordinarily ill-judged tweet. The British are deeply sentimental and irrational about animals. They will, most of ’em, be stuffed with turkey and ham from some factory farm, but they can’t abide someone killing a fox like that. Most city dwellers like the urban foxes, even if they do raid the bins. How did he think people would react? Most of us, if forced to kill a fox, would keep this as a shameful secret.
It took me exactly one google followed by one click on a “people also ask” to find the RSPCA’s advice on what to do about a trapped fox. Which is “phone us”.
I get sick of people taking one experience with an organisation (often not even their own experience) and using it as an excuse to do absolutely nothing. They can’t help if they don’t even get a call. But hey, my nan phoned them once when I was 7 and I got upset because we saw a squirrel limping, and they didn’t do anything, so that’s proof that they just sit in the office, twiddle their thumbs and take people’s money”