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Being British, of course I love animals far more than people. I’d be a fool to admit otherwise. Last winter somewhere around 25,000 pensioners died of cold but we can at least comfort ourselves in the knowledge that the vast majority of Britain’s pets were tucked up toasty warm.

But even I was shocked at the massive outpouring of emotion over the marine chucking the puppy over the cliff. If the dog was alive, and that’s by no means certain, at least its end was quick. Not like Manadel al-Jamadi’s, for instance.

Google his name, and you get 7,210 hits. ‘Puppy off cliff’ gives around 8,000 hits and the story only broke yesterday.

But anyway, US marines + puppies = bad, US marines + people = not so much. I haven’t spoken to my elderly grandmother for a few weeks but the gerbils are fed and watered.

(A thought: if those marines say de poor widdle puppy died while being water-boarded, they might get off.)

(Another thought: The way this story has shot up the Google search engine rankings with the number of people linking to it is amazing. If I were the Pentagon, I’d call the dog Abu Ghraib. That way whenever anybody Googled the prison, they’d get the sad, sad story of the poor puppy and not the photos of sexual humiliation and torture. Instant air-brushing of history.)

Update: How about this for a comment about the video:

Wow. I hope he got shot in the face later that day.

I think it’s past somebody’s bed time.