I couldn’t help but laugh at this one. Have you never had an animal destroy something of yours that either had sentimental or collectable value? A few months ago, my lovely little cat Tabitha destroyed the charger cable for my iBook, leaving me without a computer for a weekend. Thankfully, there are plenty of iBooks/PowerBooks at my parents’ house (think Borg collective on this one) so a replacement cable wasn’t far away. And my cable didn’t even come close to costing me $100,000.

The dog’s name is Barney. He’s a trained professional. The secret service wannabe is his handler Greg. Barney was on duty, protecting a collection of priceless teddy bears at the Wookey Hole Caves. For no reason at all, just like Basil Fawlty, Barney go crazy. Like an Israeli shell ripping through a UN observation post, Barney wreaked havok upon the sawdust-filled memories, including a bear once owned by the King himself. The King’s bear was called Mabel. Soft name if you ask me. I would’ve gone for something cool like Mr Bear, but that’s me.

What makes this so funny, apart from the obvious wanton destruction, is the way people have spoken about the incident. Daniel Medley, manager of the Wookey Hole Caves, had this to say:

“Up to 100 bears were involved in the massacre. It was a dreadful scene.”

I wouldn’t be calling a massacre a ‘dreadful scene’. A dreadful scene is your dog running through your house with muddy paws or a child throwing a tantrum in a supermarket. If you’re going to call it a massacre, invoke imagery of carnage, ruthless detruction and remorseless havok. Are you trying to tell me those bears were defenseless? I could swear my little brother’s bear would sneak into my room at night to try to kill me. When you’re not looking, they’re wretched little creatures. Maybe one of the bears said something about Barney’s mum and a simple head butt would have been too ‘been there, done that, got the red card’?

“Either there was a rogue scent of some kind on Mabel which switched on Barney’s deepest instincts, or it could have been jealousy: I was just stroking Mabel and saying what a nice little bear she was.” - Greg, secret service wannabe

So apart from being a security guard and dog handler, the guy is also an animal psychologist? And what grown man strokes a teddy bear?!? But I believe the rogue scent theory further strengthens my case on these awful little bears - Barney could smell the evil hidden within those innocent looking, doped-out faces.

“He [the owner] sent around one of his men to collect the body [Mabel].” - Daniel Medley

Call the fucking coroner, don’t let the grieving relative come to pick up the body. There’s a complete lack of consideration in the world today and this example further highlights it. You wouldn’t see me coming down to pick up a body from the morgue. I hope Mr. Medley was at least kind enough to pull together Mabel’s detached limbs and disembowelled sawdust, and dump it in a box for transport. That, at least, would have restored some level of consideration and human decency.

If you ask me, Barney did this world a service a couple of days ago. If we could each kill a bear a day, I guarantee a lot of the world’s problems would be halfway to being solved. Think the current Middle East crisis is about kidnapped soldiers? Soldiers is code for bears. It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s the truth.