Will Self is an author whom I increasingly appreciate. There is, for example, this exquisite ramble published recently in the London Review of Books. Animal rights folks would do well to read his novel, Great Apes. Anyway, I reproduce below in its entirety yesterday’s blog, “The Spartan Girl.” There are references to current events that not everyone will get. Plus, he’s renown for using big words and being obtuse — although he probably doesn’t see it that way. Anyway, enjoy this delicious rant.

I am sorry, oh so sorry, that I ever suggested Baroness Thatcher should’ve been torn apart by urban foxes back in the early 1980s, before she could lay waste to generations of the British working class. I hope this won’t disqualify me from becoming the leader of the Labour Party – a post which I haveabsolutely no desire to occupy, and therefore probably should. It was typically insensitive of me to call in a vulpine strike on JahThatch, who, as everyone knows, was only the passive instrument of historical change rather than its initiator. As for foxes, who but an absurd and sentimental urbanite, who refuses to acknowledge that what’s on the end of his fork is an abused fowl, would characterise these vicious and unprincipled creatures as the vanguard of the revolution? Perhaps now, at long last, after the tragic attack on the baby girls in East London, the long-awaited pogrom against London’s foxes will finally be initiated? And who better to don the red coat and tootle “Tally-Ho!” than my own local Labour MP Kate Hoey. After all, it was Hoey who chose a superb opportunity to bury bad news, by announcing on the very day that Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by armed police at Stockwelltube station in her constituency, that she would be assuming the chairmanship of the Countryside Alliance. Obviously, it’s impractical to hunt urban foxes on horseback, but I can see no reason for not putting the many hundreds of so-called “weapon dogs” who roam the parks hereabout to some sort of useful employment. And if not the dogs, then why not their owners as well, many of whom are second-generation unemployed – the sons and daughters of people who lost their jobs during the great culling on the 1980s. It would seem an elegant solution to both problems to set these folk to the maintenanceof dog packs and the manufacture of hunting tackle. Which brings us neatly full circle: eliminating foxes and unemployment with a single measure. Of course, it leaves Thatcher still alive – but then that’s a given, n’est ce pas?