When it comes to flogging animals, itÕs all in the head

Date Published: 24-Apr-2013

 Is there one amongst us who hasn’t done stupid things with drink?

Haven’t we all had one of those times when you wake up in the morning with a traffic cone at the foot of the bed or an dismantled road sign that tells you you’re hung over a full fifty miles from Clifden?

Joe O’Connor, for example, once wrote about his trip to New York for USA ’94 and waking up in the morning after a lot of drinking thinking that he’d gone deaf in one ear and had lost all the feeling on that side of his face.

Then he discovered he’d fallen asleep on his pizza and it was wedged to his head.

So let’s not throw too many stones from the roof of our glasshouse. And yet, it’s unlikely you ever plumbed the depths of punching a police horse in the head – particularly in the middle of a street riot and in front of the 50 photographers.

But that’s what befell one Newcastle United fan, who took out his frustration after his side went down to Sunderland, was photographed around the world boxing the police horse, much to his mortification when the drink wore off.

Unemployed ‘animal lover’ Barry Rogerson only made things worse for himself by claiming that he acted in self-defence – effectively that the horse started it before he landed one on the side of his head.

Horse boxes are used to transport our equine friends from A to B – but horse boxing appears to be a whole new sport for the inebriated football followers of England’s North-East.

And worst of all, our pony pugilist resorted to that last refuge of scoundrels, claiming that he apparently reacted badly to a mixture of medication and pre- and post-match drinks.

It would appear that the fusion of paracetamol with pints produces a concoction more deadly than crack cocaine, because it is at the root of almost all evil when it comes to good guys going bad.

And yet in terms of doing strange things with animals’ heads, our Geordie football fan is strictly an amateur, beaten by the gang who stole four Rhinos – horns and all – from the National Museum last week.

In their defence, these Rhino heads were just gathering dust on shelves at the the National Museum Archives in Swords – and our thieving friends might argue that, if the state didn’t want them, they knew someone who did.

Gardaí said the gang appeared to know where to find the heads and horns in a building as though that was some sort of achievement given that the store is the size of two football pitches.

But one would expect even Stevie Wonder to find four heads this size – although getting away with them in a white van would be a different matter entirely.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.