Why are the UK’s abattoir rules so pig-headed?

DUE to a chronic shortage of both abattoirs and people to work in them, thousands of pigs cannot be killed. So they’re having to be, er, killed.

It sounds mad, because it is.

Ordinarily, farmers fatten pigs until they’re just the right size and then they go off to be turned into ham and bacon and delicious pork chops.

 But due to the problem with abattoirs, and a shortage of lorry drivers to get them there, that’s not happening. 

And pigs are like me. They get fat and then they keep on getting fatter and fatter until they are too enormous to fit in the slaughterhouse. 

Plus, they breed like Catholic rabbits. On average a sow gives birth to seven or eight piglets but sometimes 14 can come out, like piggy machine gun bullets.

So farmers have a problem. Their fields and sheds are filling up at an alarming rate with pigs that are the size of fire engines. Which is why they’re having to be killed, to make way for the army of newborns.

So, you’re wondering, what’s the problem with that? They were going to be killed anyway.

Aha. This is Britain you’re talking about so there are rules.

 And what they say is that a pig killed on the farm cannot be eaten by a human.

 It’s reckoned by the fools who govern us that if you eat a pig that’s been killed by a farmer on a farm, you will immediately catch a ­terrible disease and that you’ll die, all covered in warts.

Round where I live one local is ­trying to set up a licensed mobile abattoir which would solve the problem.

 Plus, the ­animals wouldn’t have to face a long and stressful journey to the slaughterhouse.

 But last time I checked he had been rendered immobile by red tape.

Partly, this is because the pig police say that blood cannot be spilled into the soil. A hawk can kill a pigeon, spraying the area with blood, and a badger can kill a hedgehog creating a scene that could have come straight out of a Saw movie, and that’s fine.

 But when we do it? Noooooo. That’s not allowed.

So as a result, we are not killing animals so that we can eat them, which is sensible and proper.

 We are killing them and then ­basically throwing them away. Which is utterly idiotic.

Fame is a funny old Game, Nat

GAME Of Thrones was – and I’ll take no argument on this – the best TV series ever made.

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 You can forget Squid Game and Bridgerton and that chess thing. Nothing even gets close.

Which is why I live in a state of constant surprise that almost all of the stars have gone on to enjoy the sort of success normally associated with Bond girls from the early days – i.e. none at all. Where’s the girl who played Khaleesi? Or the dude who looked after her?

 And what happened to Kit Harington? 

This week, I heard that Nathalie Emmanuel, above, who gave me all sorts of problems in the trouser department whenever she appeared, was refused entry to her apartment in Budapest because the doormen didn’t recognise her.

That’s astonishing.

 Mind you, this was Hungary. So he could have had other reasons for being so unhelpful. I mean, we’ve all seen what their football fans are like . . . 

A case of ‘bahn humbug

EVER since the dawn of time, the motoring industry has argued that it makes cars which can travel at 150mph because some of them will be sold in Germany where many of the autobahns have no speed limit.

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But that may soon change, because this week the German government announced that it’s considering introducing a nationwide limit of 130km/h. Which, in English, is about 80.

Needless to say, this went down very well with the world’s dullards who’ve been running about all week gleefully telling everyone that every country in the world now has a speed limit.

They’re wrong though. One still doesn’t. The Isle of Man.

Testing times

lTHIS week, there were lots of exciting new rules about what sort of Covid tests you need to take when you’re travelling abroad, and where you can go, and what forms you’ll need to complete. But you needn’t worry about any of them. 

In the past six months, I’ve been out of the country three times, to Portugal to watch the Champions League final, and to Croatia and Italy for holidays. On each occasion, I’ve done the right thing. I forked out hundreds of pounds for tests. I filled in a million questionnaires. I downloaded apps.

 And I shoved countless prongs so far up my nose, I collected a tiny bit of brain matter, and so far down my throat I felt like Linda Lovelace.

And not once, when leaving the country or getting back, did anyone stop me to check.

Lew sure about that?

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ACCORDING to a report in yesterday’s Sun, the unusual outfit Lewis Hamilton wore as he arrived in Turkey, above, for this weekend’s Grand Prix “split opinion”.

Hmmm. That would suggest there are some people out there who liked it. And I’m not sure there are.

Twins? It’s two awful

ALARMING news. Apparently, it’s common when a woman becomes pregnant for two embryos to form and for one of them to be absorbed back into her body. 

Cool, eh? Though when I say “cool”, what I mean is “disgusting”.

Anyhow, some Dutch scientists stepped out of the coffee shop this week and announced they’ve developed a test that can determine whether you briefly shared your mum’s womb with a twin.

Very clever, I’m sure. But who do they think wants to know that they have a sister or brother still coursing round their Mum’s bloodstream?

Not me, that’s for damn sure.

Tanks to the Army

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WAS anyone else amused to see all those military chaps, who’ve been drafted in to drive tankers, wearing high-visibility jackets over their combat fatigues?

Make your mind up, guys. Do you want to be seen, or not?

I WAS perplexed this week by a photograph of one of the Lib Dem types, who was stopping the traffic to complain about loft insulation.

There was a word on the back of his high-visibility jacket, but his hood was obscuring some of it. All I could see was “. . . unt”.

 And I can’t for the life of me work out what the hidden letter was.

Feeling the burn

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I’VE spent the past month trying to design a new garden which is proving to be impossible because to me, all plants look the same and they have Latin names that I don’t understand.

But then, all my problems were solved this week when I discovered there’s a plant called “cockburnianus”.

 So it’s going in my beds because . . . well, because I have a mental age of nine.

A LECTURER has been fired for “lightly” throwing a piece of cardboard at one of his students.

Oh how times have changed. When I was at school, the teachers used to throw all sorts of things at me.

 One even hurled a blackboard rubber at my head.

And he wasn’t fired. Mind you, he might be today, for calling it a “blackboard rubber”.