Our behaviour would confuse alien observers (From This Is Local London)

Our behaviour would confuse alien observers

3:03pm Friday 22nd May 2009 in

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AN alien observer would be hard pressed to come up with an opinion about us if they had cast an eye or three over the events of the last few weeks.

On the one hand, we have seen how appallingly we can behave towards creatures we have domesticated in our service – as at the hands of James Gray in Amersham who will be sentenced next month after being found guilty of neglect and cruelty after more than 100 horses were removed from his farm. Perversely, unless the courts rule otherwise, the stricken animals remain his property.

Let us hope that the various charities that have been restoring these poor animals to health will be allowed to re-home them. The worth of any civilisation can be judged by the way in which it treats the weak, both human and animal.

We have also seen many of those we’ve elected to govern us have behave in the way you would expect of a shopper who had been given several years of free trolley dashes around a supermarket. “It’s within the rules, it’s within the rules – yippee!

Never mind that the rules were written by us and demonstrably barmy – let’s go ‘designer’!” But this is the same country that produced Major Phil Packer, the injured Iraq veteran who, having been told he would never walk again, took 13 days to complete the London marathon, raising more than £700,000 for the charity Help for Heroes.

“This is for the soldiers with far worse injuries than me” he said. Let him stand as an independent and no-one else would get a vote!

Then there’s the multi-millionaire who is selling his £7m hotel complex in Northumberland to buy a small house in Alnwick in which to live out his retirement.

The balance of the proceeds he is giving to cancer charities on the basis that he came into this life with nothing and wishes to leave with nothing. Most of us inhabit the middle ground between these two extremes.

We are not perfect but we forbear to pillage public revenue for our own benefit and we are kind to the citizens and animals with whom we share this planet. We may not be saints and we don’t have much chance to take advantage of sloppily drafted, impossibly generous rules, because we don’t get to write our own rules.

You know who writes ours, of course.