It seems that Bill Oddie’s fluffy Springwatch television programme has been in a spot of bother because it keeps showing pictures of animals and birds doing sex. Well, obviously I’m not especially given to defending the twitching weird beard but, honestly, all that birds and animals do is eat, sleep and mate. If you take the rumpy-pumpy out of the equation, what’s left?

You can’t even show them having lunch these days because a bird wrenching a worm from the ground would have vegetablists putting the producer’s name on an internet hit list. Anyway, the sparrow porn, the rampant carnivorism and the ducky gangbangs are not the problem. No. It’s the awful syrupy way that all nature’s little creatures are judged and measured by human standards.

We are shown some footage of daddy swallow tenderly picking each of his little babies from the nest . . . and dropping them onto the floor, where they will gasp for a bit, in great pain, and then die. It’s presented as though we are watching Josef Fritzl, but we are not. We are watching an ounce of feathers and bone killing its kids, not because it’s stupid or psychopathic but because it’s a bird.

Are we supposed to think that all swallows kill their kids? Isn’t that a bit like saying all human men wander about town centres at night stabbing one another with screwdrivers?

By all means tell me that a swallow can fly all the way from Africa and find the same barn in Norfolk that it left six months earlier. That is amazing. Or find one that can’t. Because that would be hysterical. But do not try to convince me that swallows have some great intelligence that we humans lack. Because they don’t.

It’s much the same story with dolphins. Time and time again, nature presenters portray them as bright. But compared with what - a table lamp? A lobster? The fact is this: my dishwasher, by any measure, has a greater power of reasoning.

And anyway if it’s suggested that a swallow could write a book if only it had hands, or build a box girder bridge if you gave it a spanner, then when we see it indulging in infanticide, we will feel duty-bound to come round to the Springwatch bird box and wring its cruel and vindictive little neck.

Of course, we can get sentimental about animals. I like my dogs very much. Sometimes I talk to them as though they are my children. I’ve even trained them to fetch sticks and sit down. In other words, I’ve attempted to make them more human. But this is futile because they are not human.

I know this because they spend most of their day in the paddocks eating horse shit. When they’ve had their fill, they come into the house and vomit onto every flat surface they can find. This has caused a great many arguments between my wife and me since we made a deal when the real children were young that I’d deal with the sick and she’d deal with the poo.

I maintain, on this basis, that although the horse poo has come out of the dog’s mouth and is therefore technically vomit, it is not. And that she must therefore clear it up. Normally, we end up taking out our rage on the dogs.

This is unfair. They do not know that if they must heave out the contents of their stomachs they should try to avoid the Bukhara rugs.

A dog knows to bark at burglars and to be doe-eyed and sweet when you tickle its tummy; but don’t get confused - it has no concept of Pakistani hand-knotted silks.

You see the problem. Because Oddie tells us that badgers are sweet and swallows are clever, we are unable to react properly when they vomit on our furniture or eat our children. Some people are so confused by the heart-wrenching nature of nature programmes that they have descended into madness and become vegetarians.

They point at me with hate in their eyes because I’ve killed a pheasant. But it’s not a pheasant. It’s lunch. What’s more, I’ll shoot any fox that breaks into my chicken coop and attempts to destroy my breakfast factory. And I’ll stop only if one day foxy-woxy turns up with a bigger gun than mine.

Every time an Australian gets washed up on Bondi beach with one leg and half his head missing, there’s always some shaggy-haired dopehead on the news saying the great white that attacked the poor soul was only being a shark. Absolutely. And we’re only being human, which is why we’re throwing hand grenades at the bloody thing.

The best way, I reckon, to cure people of their soft-focus, teary-eyed view of animals is to get them to imagine a nature programme made by dogs about humans.

What would they make of people who collect stamps? Or people who ride motorcycles? Or vicars? Or people who devote their whole lives to helping others? How many hours would they devote to the fact that the most powerful people on earth now face the choice of electing as their leader a black man with a vision but no policies or someone who’s so old that he needs to have his food mashed? They’d find us as strange as we, by rights, should find them.

And what on earth would Rover Attenborough say when he happened upon Kate Humble? “Look at this one. She’s adorable. Talented. Funny. And very cute. So what the bloody hell is she doing on television with a fat, hairy man who won’t shut up, gets off on stag beetles having sex and becomes all sentimental when a swallow doesn’t follow the Daily Mail’s instructions on being a good dad?”

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