Toad Hall

RiverbankBulletin

Jan-June 2002

The queen of papal apologists embraces the hunters. Tally-ho!

For the benefit of the vast majority of newspaper readers who don't know her from Eve or the Queen of Sheba, Cristina Odone is a regular contributor to the Sunday Observer newspaper and deputy editor of the New Statesman..

One of her recent efforts is entitled: 'Shabby deal over hunting', and makes the remarkable suggestion that the passage of a bill to outlaw hunting with hounds, such as MPs have already voted overwhelmingly for on two separate occasions, is in fact a device for rewarding those same MPs for supporting the beleaguered minister Stephen Byers.

Her view of life is one that permeates most of the present-day Roman Catholic church, of which she is an unashamed propagandist. Put very simply - but I hope not unfairly - her unfailing message is that only one form of life is significant. Human life. All other manifestations of nature or of God's will and purpose are incidental to the health, wealth and happiness of homo sapiens.

Her chubby smile illuminates the page with a glow of messianic rightness and assurance. No one would accuse her of ambivalence or sentimentality.

If any of us awoke today worrying about the health of our faithful pet dog or cat or canary, if we wince at the torture of man's nearest evolutionary relatives by people who mistakenly call themselves scientists, if we deplore the culinary practices of Italian Catholics (or Moslems/Jews) who trap millions of beautiful migratory birds that have achieved miracles of arduous travel in order to provide an interesting little meal, if we are sickened by the sporting activities of Spanish Catholics who torment magnificent bulls for an hour or so of dubious entertainment, if we have doubts about the desirability of Britain's spoilt rural hedonists chasing a fox, a deer or a hare for the pleasure of a bloody kill, we must stop worrying. Put away our bleeding hearts.

Ms Odone, who I believe once edited a Catholic daily, has a message for us all. Don't be so silly. Don't waste your breath or dissipate your goodwill. God put us here on this earth not to share its fruits and its pleasures, not to enjoy the unity of nature, not to assist the bird in its migration or the wild animal in its fight for survival, but to bear witness to mankind's supremacy and right to absolute dominion and unchallenged indulgence - all of us, Genghiz Khan, Adolph Hitler, Comrade Stalin, the Pope, Bin Laden, the Borgias, President Bush, Mr and Mrs Blair, you, me, Ms Odone, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, witnesses to a world of exclusively human indulgence.

According to her, St Francis, Leonardo, Voltaire, Byron, Shaw, all looked at life through a distorting mirror. The facts are quite simple. Other creatures may have been put there by God, but only incidentally; they have no souls, therefore they have no feeling, no rights, no call upon our compassion. The world was created for us, it is nothing to do with them.

And if Cristina Odone has her way, we'll bloody well hang on to it without wasting our energies banging on about worthless birds, bees and quadrupeds.

'When was the last time you hunted?' she asks her readers, as if the question is in some way relevant. When 50,000 Countryside Alliance members marched on Hyde Park, 'the rest of us dismissed the issue as a bit of rural nostalgia' she tells us with the charming smile of one who knows she is right. But no, Cristina, you are mistaken.

Let me ask you a question. Have you been to Afghanistan? I doubt it. But I don't for a moment assume from that that you are incapable of making up your mind about religious intolerance, at least when it is exhibited by extremist Moslems. Few of us have been to Afghanistan or know much about the origins of Taliban fundamentalism, but most of us have a view about the rights and wrongs of driving aeroplanes into occupied towers. Relatively few of us have been forced to give birth to an unwanted child by the pro-life lobby that she undoubtedly supports, but we do have views of many shades on the desirability of allowing one religion to force its moral precepts on the rest of us. We don't have to go hunting to know the despair of Tarka the Otter, to know the misery of the fox or wolf, bear or badger, driven from its hard won territory and lovingly cared for family.

Most of us do not have to be confronted with 'scientific evidence' (though plenty exists) of the consequences of such 'sporting' activities. Most of us have recourse to a highly desirable faculty called imagination.

It is not the 50,000 dragooned supporters of a few privileged pleasure seekers that this doctrinaire writer should worry about. It is the millions who vehemently oppose her comfortable, complacent, middle-class view of a life. For her, hunting and the fate of a few 'soulless' creatures is neither here nor there. It is in reality only the tip of a pernicious iceberg. What concerns the residents of Toad Hall, and I suspect the non-Catholic majority of decent humans, is the presumption of the Odones of this world and their religious mentors; the unshakeable belief that they enjoy some kind of shortcut to the truth in matters that leave millions of women, mainly poor and ill-educated, and mainly in poor, over-populated Catholic countries, victims of a pernicious belief in the 'rights' of human embryos, while denying rights of any kind to all the rest of nature, including female victims of rape.

Tony Banks, consistent and laudable supporter of underprivileged humans and abused creatures of the wild, is assumed by this lady to be indifferent to faulty railway signalling and congested motorways because he is concerned about the fate of mules in Afghanistan. Of course, in Afghanistan mules are the innocent victims of man-made violence and treachery. But the devotion of Ms Odone to the church and the truth universal leaves little room for philosophical nicety. That someone like Tony Banks should actually care about both is clearly beyond her limited powers of understanding. She makes the mistake of believing that her approval of a precept invests it with acceptability.

Hers is language that ought to find a more suitable home than the Observer or the New Statesman. The editors of the journals she contributes to with such prim bias should attach a health warning to her column -

The views expressed in this article are those of an acknowledged Roman Catholic propagandist and should not be taken to represent the editorial opinion of this journal.

This page written in January 2002. Since then Ms Odone has left the New Statesman. Last edited 30 December 2004