I've only ever had one proper screaming argument with an animal rights activist. That was a great night. It was at a student party. She told me she believed animal lives to be worth just as much as human lives. I told her she was the most apathetically selfish person I'd ever met.

“Because if that place down the road was selling Kentucky Fried Person,” I explained, “I'd probably firebomb it. Not just sit here whingeing, with a spliff and a can of Skol.”

Thereafter, the screaming began. It was a lesson for me, though. Until then, I'd always assumed that people who passionately cared about stuff must have actually thought about it, too. Not so. And I thought about this yesterday morning, when I read about those monkeys with luminous feet.

The monkeys? With the feet? We've mucked about with their DNA, I think, and made their feet glow green, like a jellyfish. Now they've had babies, which have green feet, too. (Monkey babies. Don't get confused.) This means they can do all sorts of other things to their DNA, too, like give them multiple sclerosis. Scientists believe that this is a good thing, because they might eventually be able to cure them, too. Animal rights activists believe it is a bad thing. They don't think that monkeys should be given multiple sclerosis in the first place. They think it would be too mean.

Fair enough, on the surface. Only not if you properly think about it. So I can only assume that they never have. You see, logically speaking, this is an argument with only two sides. On one side, you think a human is worth more than a monkey. On the other, you don't. That's it. There's nowhere else to go.

The thing is, everybody thinks a human is worth more than a monkey. Some people just pretend not to. They'll campaign and firebomb and dig up people's grandmothers, sure, but when push comes to shove, they still think that their own lives are worth more than monkey lives. Because if they didn't, why wouldn't they just offer to take the monkeys' place?

Monkeys, after all, are a bit like humans. That's why the experiments work. But you animal rights activists, well, you're exactly like humans. You'd work even better. “Don't give the monkey multiple sclerosis,” you could say. “Give it to me. And my kids. Give us glowing feet, too, if you fancy. Anything for a monkey.”

No? Not tempted? Strange. Because you're already prepared to sacrifice other people for monkeys, aren't you? I'm talking about the people who already have multiple sclerosis, or motor neuron disease, or Parkinson's, or a hundred other grim and terrifying ways to go. And the people who are one day going to. You'll sacrifice them, but not yourselves. It's as though, when you say “monkeys are worth as much as people” you actually mean “monkeys are worth as much as people who aren't me”. Or, more likely, you just haven't properly thought about it. Start screaming as soon as you like.

Chance remark

Poor Met Office. They'll be beating themselves up about this Bournemouth thing, and it's really not their fault. “On Bank Holiday Monday alone,” says the town's head of tourism, “we lost 25,000 visitors because the weather forecast was so poor.” He's angry, he says, because the forecast suggested thundery showers all day. Actually, it stopped raining at 9am.

I went to the Met Office once, in Exeter. Lovely place, full of lovely people but, my God, the journalist's nightmare. They don't answer questions. Or rather, they do, but so precisely that their answers don't really tell you anything. What those forecasters will have wanted to say, before the telly and the websites and all those demure weather girls with their suggestive hair got involved, would be something along the lines of “there's only an 18 per cent possibility of precipitation arising from a bank of cloud that has a 21 per cent chance of wafting above somewhere that has a 32 per cent chance of being Bournemouth, and we're 63 per cent confident in that prediction”.

The Met Office rarely gets things wrong. Sometimes what will probably happen just doesn't happen. But that doesn't mean it wasn't probably going to. See?

Warm welcome

In this space yesterday, Matthew Parris wrote that that Knapp, the male among his llamas, seems inclined to fight those who invade his space. I'm shocked.

You see, I've met these llamas. They charged me once, while I was collecting wood outside his home. At speed. Murder in their shiny eyes. “Nonsense,” chuckled Matthew afterwards, “they were just coming over to say hello.” I don't think so, I told him. It was pretty scary. Legs all over the place. Steam pouring from their innumerable nostrils. Their mouths (beaks?) drawn back into snarls. I only just managed to drop my logs and vault over a nearby fence.

Matthew just sighed at this and I felt, somehow, that I had disappointed him. And yet here he is, in print, airily admitting that at least one of them is virtually a psychopath. I bloody knew it. Vindicated.

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