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It has been said, by presumably humorous persons, that the camel is a horse which has been designed by a committee, but this is surely complete nonsense for the camel is clearly an elegant and well rounded beast, showing consistent adaptations to its arid environment from the closeability of its nose right through to the consistency of its dung. Why, one might as well reverse the claim and say that the horse is a camel designed by a committee of Midwestern irrigation and lawn-care specialists ...or maybe of avid rose growers.
No---here we are merely barking up the wrong tree.
Now if you want to bark up the right tree, and see an animal which really looks like it’s been designed by a committee, look not among the ruminants nor the ungulates but among the rodents. Look, indeed, at that horrid and hypocritical vermin the Gray Squirrel. The Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis) is plainly nothing more than a rat designed by a committee of the nastier lawyers from Walt Disney Inc. using the Fuller Brush Company as a focus group.
 This fluffy, filthy and disgusting rat is my subject for the week, so if you have a weak stomach, or do not like to contemplate pure evil over breakfast you’d better go and have your shower now, or if you have already showered, since you’ve been exposed thus far to the Gray Squirrel, you’ll probably need to go and have a second one.
Let me make one thing clear from the beginning; or rather, looking at my watch, from about a fifth of the way through; that anything nasty that I say this morning applies solely and specifically to the American Gray Squirrel. Indeed there are countless other species of squirrel, in more than 40 genera, scattered around the world and to the upright character of most of them I can personally attest, they are honest, hard-working citizens to a man ...eh… rodent.
 Take, for example, take the delightful red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) which we have in England: a more demure and lovable bunch of sweetness and light ne’er graced a tree. Actually, now I think on it, it would be more accurate to have said ‘had in England’ rather than ‘have in England,’ for we had in England a full complement of our nice red squirrels until 1876 when the first pair of Gray Squirrels were released in Henbury Park, Cheshire by that swine Brocklehurst. After that those fluffed up gray sciuricidal maniacs of course promptly and pushily took over all the best parks and woods and have, to date, all but exterminated their poor, polite red cousins; cutting in line at all the best trees to grab every nut in sight, and even worse, as has always been just typical of American pioneers, they have spread disease among the native populations.
Probably intentionally!
Yes these vile interlopers all seem to have the squirrelpox which to such hardened Typhoid Maries is little more than a bad cold, but to the innocent red squirrels of England it’s a sentence of cruel and fevered death.
And all the while these sneaky rodents have been writing home: begging letters full of scare stories about the red menace, to fool elderly American ladies into sending them food packages.
Well! Having disposed of the global policies of the Gray Squirrel, let us close by briefly examining the character of the ‘fluff-rat’ at home.
Lending credence to my theory of their Disneylawyerly origins, it is plain that they are, without a hint of conscience or pride, unbearably cutesy to such an extent that even the younger Mary Kate and Ashley were reputed to be nauseated by them: sitting around like pert harlots all fluffy with cute big feather boas; striving, with all the effort their publicists can manage, to be as cutely anthropomorphic as all get-up (not the younger Mary Kate and Ashley---I mean the squirrels) so that they (the squirrels) can more easily prey on those little old ladies back home; all of whom are on fixed incomes; soulessly cutesying them out of their last fragments of Wonderloaf. But you will soon see, if you take a Gray Squirrel and tie it down and shave it, the horrid reality beneath the fluff; and it’s about time someone did just that to finally unmask this Uriah Heep of the animal kingdom.
And, having done so, let’s remember as they say “The only good Gray Squirrel is a dead one” so may I add “why not improve one today?”
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton
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