Read Online Holidays in Heck by P. J. O’Rourke - Free Book Online

of, and I’ve been trying for forty years to no avail.
    â€œUsing a pack of dogs,” Mr. Hobday continued, “with the best will in the world you can’t do much about the cruelty. And in practical terms it’s impossible to have legislation that covers everything.”
    I asked if class conflict was involved in the hunting ban.
    â€œFrom our perspective,” Mr. Hobday said, “there’s no class element at all. Hare coursing is banned, though it’s working class.” (Hare coursing is letting greyhounds chase hares in a field—a sort of libertarian dog racing without the bother of a track,) “In the minds of ordinary people,” Mr. Hobday said, hunting is “not an issue of class but an issue of behavior. Hunters are seen to behave in a very arrogant fashion—hunts going through smallholdings and gardens. Hunters are very poor about apologizing. There’s an attitude of entitlement by hunters: ‘It’s our land and we have the right.’”
    And that, in America, would be all the apologizing needed. I mentioned how different America was—how Senator Kerry hadn’t been able to get through his presidential campaign without going on a goose hunt, so there’d be a photo of him holding a gun.
    â€œBut not a goose,” Mr. Hobday said.
    Mr. Hobday told me an anecdote, though he said he couldn’t vouch for it personally. Someone on the League’s staff had told it to him. At a protest against foxhunting, before the ban, one of the protesters had gone up to a hunter and said, “We’re going to make what you do illegal.”
    The hunter looked down from his horse and said, “People like you obey the law. People like us
make
the law.”
    This is an anecdote contradicted by what I saw in Exmoor, and exactly opposite to what has happened legislatively, but it still makes good telling. If you understand it, you may understand what’s going on in Britain. I don’t.
    I walked from the offices of the League Against Cruel Sports, in Southwark, to the nearby Tate Modern, to look at the works of Damien Hirst. He is the artist who has floated a sheep in formaldehyde and sliced a cow into sections and so forth for the sake of sculpture. He is a today’s-urban-elite kind of artist—cutting edge, one might say. Unfortunately, the Tate Modern had only one piece by Hirst on display: some seashells with a curator’s commentary on the wall beside them:
    â€œYou kill things to look at them,” Hirst has said. In this work he arranges a selection of ornate shells, purchased in Thailand, inside a glass cabinet. Resembling a museum display case [for Pete’s sake, it
was
a museum display case], it alludes to the 19th century tradition of collecting and classifying natural specimens. Inevitably, the approach involves removing plants and animals from their natural habitats, killing them in order to preserve them . . .
    But Hirst was not buying seashells for sport.
    In the grassy median of Park Lane, near Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner, is the Animals in War memorial—“Unveiled 24 November 2004 by Princess Anne.” Its two sweeping curves of concrete wall resemble parts of a non-Euclidian traffic barrier. On the inside of one curve is carved THEY HAD NO CHOICE . Bronze pack mules march toward the gap between the walls. Beyond the gap a bronze dog and a bronze horsewalk away, metaphorically in heaven, though actually farther up Park Lane. A eulogy mentions even pigeons. No need to cast one in bronze, though, with so many live ones alighting on the monument.
    Here are some British newspaper items I collected on my visit:
    A leading cancer charity has rejected a £30,000 donation from the organizer of sponsored bird shoots because it does not approve of the way the money was raised.
    â€”
The Sunday Telegraph
, March 20
    Professor John Webster, emeritus professor at Bristol University, discussed the intelligence