RICHARD ORD: On cats' chances at Crufts and the human rights of husbands

Mark my words, in my lifetime, a cat will win Crufts.
Our columnist gets more catty by the week ...Our columnist gets more catty by the week ...
Our columnist gets more catty by the week ...

It’s inevitable.

Not through some lax vetting procedures or elaborate pet disguise (though I wouldn’t rule either out), but because a cat-lover somewhere will win an appeal to the European Courts over the infringement of their human, or feline, rights.

“How dare they have a dog-only competition,” they’ll cry. “It’s cattist!”

The seeds of rebellion have already been sown.

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Only two weeks ago the annual British Pie Awards was won by a pasty! Next year, it’ll be a cheese and onion sandwich. By the end of the decade the winner of the British Pie Awards may well be the banana. And what would be wrong with that? You fruitist.

We live in an age where people care less about the infringement of rights, but appear extremely concerned with the universal uninfringement of our rights. Whether we think we need those rights uninfringeing or not. (I reserve my right to use a word the word uninfringeing even if it doesn’t exist … don’t be a wordist).

Take civil partnerships. Gay people fought long and hard for the right to have same sex marriages.

But even in victory, someone had to take the rights issue too far.

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Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell revealed in an interview that we shouldn’t stop at civil partnerships for gays. ‘Why shouldn’t straight men have the right to marry each other?’ he said. Erm, maybe because they don’t want to!

Why people would fight for the right to get married in the first place was beyond me. But to try and start a fight for the right for straight men to marry each other, when they hadn’t even asked for the right, was bizarre.

As a married man, I gave up my basic human rights the moment I said “I do.”

But that was my decision. I accept it. The infringement of a man’s human rights is one of the main tenets of marriage. Or so my wife tells me.

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There seems to be an unquenchable desire in modern society to give everyone the right to do what they please.

Take the next James Bond. There’s a growing movement to make the next Bond a black man. I don’t particularly have problem with that, but I do have a problem with people who don’t think it’s such a good idea being branded racist.

Idris Elba was, at one stage, the bookies favourite to become the first black James Bond.

The writer Anthony Horowitz was branded a racist when he ventured the opinion that Elba wouldn’t be his first choice.

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To put the debate to bed, I think makers of the next Bond movie should cast a one-legged black lesbian Royalty-hating communist in the role of James Bond. I think it’s what Ian Fleming would have wanted.

Either that or a cat.