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Up the Creek. Without a Paddle

A quiet Sunday morning, at last. To the shops, clutching my wallet. There to purchase input, in the form of the Sunday papers (the Mail and the Telegraph, as it happens, but before Vicus Scurra gets on my case, I should point out that this is only because they were both offering free DVDs this week).

I lugged them back (I use the word advisedly) and proceeded to sort out the parts I actually wanted to read. In the process, I created a reject pile containing:

- The Financial Mail on Sunday
- The Mail on Sunday Winter Wonders section
- The Mail Property on Sunday
- The Mail on Sunday You Magazine
- The Sunday Telegraph Travel section
- The Sunday Telegraph Home and Living section
- The Sunday Telegraph Money and Jobs section
- The Sunday Telegraph Business section
- A Debenhams Christmas gift catalogue
- The connoisseur's guide to great chocolate
- A one-page leaflet for Hillarys Blinds (who?)
- A Nigella Lawson recipe leaflet
- A B&Q Big Christmas catalogue (44 pages long, this one)
- A leaflet from Norwich Union offering me life cover I already have
- A John Lewis 'switched-on gifts' catalogue
- Another one-page leaflet for Hillarys Blinds (I repeat: who?)
- A leaflet from thoughtful.org
- A leaflet from CapitalOne offering me a credit card for the 400th time this year
- A Body Shop gift catalogue
- A leaflet offering me insurance for the over 50s (I imagine this fell out of the Mail)
- A leaflet from Sky TV
- The Telegraph listings section (I've already got one from yesterday's Guardian)
- The Mail on Sunday news section

These are the sections I kept:

- The Sunday Telegraph Sports section (Chelsea are playing Manchester United today)
- The Mail Football on Sunday (ditto. Most weekends one sports section is enough)
- Night and Day Live (one piece that might interest me, but will probably feel like eating Chinese)
- The Telegraph News section (yes, Vicus, I know. A cursory glance, I promise)

OK. I have a paper recycling box outside the back door. So all this unread pulp (I'm talking about the content, not the materials) will be re-used, thus prolonging the life of a few no doubt sustainably managed trees. In environmental terms, this is nothing compared to what my car pumped out on the way to the shops to buy the damn papers in the first place.

But ferchrissake what is wrong with us that we sanction this kind of waste? Why do we keep swallowing the newspaper publishers' protestations that they do this all in the name of 'choice'? If choice really is the issue, why don't we insist on buying our newspaper sections individually?

Why, in fact, are we so dumb?
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Meanwhile, the fox hunting season has started. And boyohboy here we go again. Foxes, it turns out, are still being killed. Cruelty to animals, it turns out, is still legal providing you use a bird of prey to do the killing rather than a pack of dogs (or take a bird of prey along for the ride just in case the police show up and ask how the fox was killed). Hares, it turns out, are free to roam the countryside without fear - but rabbits can still be hunted any way you damn well please.

And hunting, it turns out, is more popular than ever. Attendances are actually up.

Let's see... I seem to remember we started talking about banning hunting shortly after Labour came to power. That was nearly ten years ago. More than enough time to draft a piece of legislation that worked. It wasn't like they rushed the thing through parliament.

And yet we're left with the cock-up to end all cock-ups: a piece of law that serves only to exacerbate class division, barely protects the animals it claims to protects, and will eventually tie up the police and the legal system with a load of pointless and unnecessary business that benefits no-one except the lawyers.

Two days ago, I caught a man from the League Against Cruel Sports and a man from one of the hunts arguing on the radio. The man from the League was one of those hideous bullying debaters who seem to think that constant interruption and talking louder than everybody else somehow strengthens your case.

It didn't. By the time they stopped bickering, I'd almost switched my allegiance. Not enough to actually sign up with the local hunt, you understand - but enough to defend their right to do whatever floats their boat, no matter how stupid and archaic and cruel to animals. Which is what hunting is.

What fox-hunting isn't is important. It's a daft practice, carried out by daft people, that echoes a small part of our cultural history. Leave it alone, and it'll probably wither on the vine, like all daft traditions. Confront it on the grounds of class, and you polarise class prejudices. Confront it on the grounds of cruelty, and you divert attention from the places where animals are genuinely mistreated - in the factory farms and supermarkets that we all, every last one of us, collude in supporting every time we pop in for a newspaper.

And all the while we confront the hunts in that double-standard pet-loving class-envious kind of way we're wasting energy that could be directed towards solving real problems. The skies are warming, the icecaps are melting, the coral is dying, and we're losing species like they're going out of style. Yet we continue to patronise the supermarkets; we continue to equate social status with the size of our cars' engines; we continue to fight for dwindling oil resources rather than research the alternatives; we continue to believe that a society built on ever-increasing consumption is somehow the best way of life the human race ever dreamt up.

For the second time this peaceful Sunday morning: why are we so dumb?