Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/611961
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 6 DECEMBER 2015 24 24 Opinion I t seems that 'lousy excuses involving animals' are all the rage these days. Such a shame it wasn't like that when I tried convincing my teacher that 'my dog had eaten my homework ' at school. Even I thought it was a lousy excuse at the time. I thought so, even though I also knew it was indeed what had happened. He really did eat my homework. And everything else in my schoolcase, too. And pretty much anything that was ever carelessly left within possible wolfing distance (including, once, my entire P.E. kit. I know this for a fact, because I had to clean up his droppings afterwards. One pile of crap had a Soldini logo…) Not only is all this an incontrovertible fact; but to be honest, it would not even remotely surprise anyone who's ever actually lived with a dog. Especially an untameable, unmanageable Labrador lookalike, whose only reaction to anything in its path was to try either eating, humping, or tunnelling right through it (in that order). Not unlike the way certain local developers behave when the environment gets in their way, now that I think about it… But let's leave that for later. All the same: I didn't seriously expect to be believed. There's something too obviously cliché about the excuse to actually work… which is kind of unfair, really. After all, dogs have been known to eat a lot stranger things than just copybooks, as the Internet will quickly confirm: cushions, entire sofas, Rubik cubes, chess sets, other dogs… It is certainly more plausible than being abducted by aliens, or having your home destroyed by a tornado, or any other of the equally lousy excuses I tried using (with much the same success) at the time. But such is life, I suppose. A lousy excuse remains lousy, even – or especially – if it happens to be true. I suspect the Prime Minister must have felt the same way this week, when he tried justif ying the authority's failure to take action on an illegal zoo –which ultimately resulted in a three-year-child hospitalised with grievous injuries – by hinting that the fate of all the cute, cuddly animals it contains may hang in the balance. "When we looked at the options that were available, one of them was to kill the animals," he rather bluntly told the press this week. "We didn't want to do that… we don't want to kill animals, either in general or in cases like this. But the truth is that we were working on this before the accident happened…" Followed by a commitment to 'take the necessary action with regard to illegal zoos': for which, he repeated throughout the brief interview, no regulations actually exist. Consultation is therefore Too illegal to do anything about… Raphael Vassallo I suspect the Prime Minister must have felt the same this week, when he tried justifying the authority's failure to take action on an illegal zoo