Kill them - but how..

Every day, I see the cutest little grey squirrels lolloping across the lawn in front of our house, with their cute little cheeks puffed out and acorns nestled in their cute little mouths. Even I can see just how cute they are. Its no wonder so many of the British people are appalled by those of us who want to exterminate as many as possible of these evil 'rats with tails'.

Simon Heffer thinks we should shoot them. Got to catch them first! Truth is its been a losing battle. There are reckoned to be five million of them in Britain. The genuinely lovely red squirrels have been driven out of most of Britain by the greys and their diseases. Millions of our trees are dying because the greys have removed bark from their trunks. We simply do not know the scale of the damage they do to songbirds by raiding their nests. Grey squirrels are not cute - they are horrible creatures.

But salvation may be to hand. Contraception may do the trick. First time I heard about this, a few years ago, I thought it was a joke. But it seems that it's serious. I should make clear that we're not talking about little rubber sheaths - but an oral contraceptive. The only problem left to be solved is how to deliver it without sterilising the the entire population of wild creatures that might help themselves to what the squirrels leave behind.

I have been thinking about using traps after a friend told me how effective they are. But I'm not sure how I would kill them - being a bit soft-hearted. My friend is rather a gentle lady named Ivernia, who rather shocked me by telling me that she keeps a water butt close by and simply drops the trap into the butt. Official advice is that they should be ushered into a sack and beaten to death with a stick. It's illegal to let them go. What a tragedy it is that grey squirrels were ever imported to Britain.