The Missing Boa Constrictor

That boa constrictor pictured eating a pigeon in Leytonstone, East London the other day - why didn't someone beat it to death with a stick?  After all, it was clearly some sort of illegal immigrant - the last time I checked, boa constrictors are not native to the UK - and was busy killing a true blue British pigeon.  I mean, despite often being dismissed as 'flying vermin', there is no doubt that the common or garden pigeon is something of a British icon. After all, what do you think of when you think of Trafalgar Square (apart from Nelson's Column, the lions, the fountains, etc)?  Yes, that's right: hordes of pigeons.  Birds so hated that people flock there to feed the feathered bastards.  Yet, despite the love clearly felt for the British pigeon, did anyone try to aid the one that was getting eaten by a snake?  A foreign snake at that.  A snake that was undoubtedly here illegally.  Where are those gangs of racist EDL thugs when you need them, eh? (Probably attacking socialist bookshops, an incident you might not know about if you rely upon the right wing press and BBC for your news, outlets which seemed more interested in alleged 'left wing thugs' vandalising millionaire tosspot Jacob Rees-Mogg's property).  I suppose that if it had been a Black Mambo, they might have been more interested in beating its head in.  They are probably too ill educated to know that boa constrictors aren't native to these shores. 

But the matter of what we accept as indigenous wildlife and which we reject as 'immigrants' is an interesting one.  Take squirrels, for instance.  Fuelled by biased media reporting, the British public likes to bill and coo over the red squirrel, on the basis that it is 'indigenous' to Britain, while demonising the dominant grey squirrel as a horrible foreign scourge.  It's something I've never understood.  The fact is that I've never seen a red squirrel in the wild - not many people have.  I've grown up only knowing the grey squirrel and have never understood the hatred directed toward it.  It is portrayed as this terrible interloper which has violently usurped the poor red squirrel.  The reality, of course, is that the ascendancy of the grey squirrel is natural selection in action.  The grey squirrel has become dominant in the UK because it is more adaptable, ore versatile and smarter than its red cousin.  The idea that the red somehow has a 'right' to live here because it has 'always; lived in the UK is sentimental nonsense.  It simply isn't how nature works.  An acquaintance once tried to justify their veneration of the red squirrel by dismissing the grey squirrel as 'having come here on a boat'.  In point of fact, as I was forced to point out to them, so did my ancestors (On a Viking longship and/or the Saxon equivalent thereof) - and theirs, probably - displacing the indigenous Britons.

But back to that boa constrictor business, not only did nobody save that pigeon, but the bloody snake was rewarded by being taken away to some animal sanctuary, or other.  Bloody typical of the way these illegal immigrants get preferential treatment, eh?  I bet that it claimed it was an asylum seeker, fleeing from oppression in its homeland.  Bastard.  (I can't help but feel that this whole incident was inspired by an episode of 'The Goon Show' from around 1958, entitled 'The Missing Boa Constrictor'. Spike Milligan was truly ahead of his time).