The government has sanctioned the cull of all Americans in Britain! – Okay the yanks in question are ducks and it’s to protect the future of some Spanish ducks that don’t breed as successfully as their American cousins.

Apparently, these smooth quacking yanks are shagging their Spanish counterparts so often that there’s a danger of the European species becoming ‘hybridised’.

So what! I certainly can’t tell the difference between them and besides if nature considers it okay for a ‘hybrid’ to develop, who on Earth are we to decide that we have to ethnically cleanse the continent of nature’s winners.

It’s inconsistent with the treatment of the Grey squirrel and the mink – two other imported species that have proved themselves more successful than the native inhabitants and in these cases it wasn’t a hybridisation process – it was wholesale replacement. There was no cull of these and by the warped logic being applied for the cull of the ducks, the squirrel and the mink would appear to be a clearer case.

Okay, cutting through the crap metaphorisism, can they say that there is a justification for killing these innocent creatures merely for being slightly different? It’s not for food and these ducks are not a pest, (morally grey reasons at best anyway), so how can they justify the cull.

Recently, there was a move to cull hedgehogs from a Scottish Island, into which they had been accidentally released. There was a bit of a public outcry about it and some of the hedgehogs had a stay of execution. Will the same happen for these unfortunate ducks – I doubt it. Perhaps they’re a victim of the prevailing anti-Americanism!