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Post by DR. QUIST on Nov 8, 2009 16:35:46 GMT -5
With thanks to Tony Darbyshire for providing the following article.
“Though tender towards toads, I have little sympathy with man-eating rats. My heart went out to the Doomwatch team in this week’s episode (BBC 1) as they battered stuffed rats from their trouser-legs with shrieks of horror. The tale purported to concern a race of intellectual rats who developed a taste for people, and are tracked down by Quist and his men. Actually the rats seemed positively abstemious, considering their numbers. Beyond the odd nibble at a passer-by they contented themselves with one or two children and half a lady scientist. When you think how human beings treat one another, this amounts practically to peaceful coexistence. The rats one saw most of had a quiet, pet-shop air, and seemed alarmed by the panic they aroused. ‘It’s like a shark,’ screamed Quist at one cowering specimen. Well, like a large mouse. Super-rat society was also unfairly stigmatised. ‘They herd mice like we herd cows,’ their breeder explained. ‘Embryonic Nazis on four legs’ gasped the impressionable Doomwatch boss. Curious to think of dairy farming as a fascist pastime. A scientist can, to be sure, turn a rat into a horror. But he does it by letting it limp around with huge induced cancers, or with part of its intestine clipped outside its skin. A glimpse of one of these humanitarian experiments would have been inestimably more stomach-turning than the furry funsters of Doomwatch.”
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