Stranger News: Lord Heseltine brutally murdered his dog and over 350 squirrels.

Stranger News: Lord Heseltine brutally murdered his dog and over 350 squirrels.

Well, maybe not the dog, but the squirrels, yep, he massacred those little, grey feckers.

 

For some reason, unknown to virtually everyone, Lord Heseltine, the former Conservative Deputy Prime Minister of Britain, has been in the news today for strangling his pet dog.

 

Heseltine told Tatler magazine, and god only knows why, that his mother's pet dog, an Alsatian called Kim, had a mental breakdown, so he grabbed its choker chain and pulled it tight until he went limp. We assume he means the dog went limp, not him.

 

Various news broadcasts and social media immediately jumped on the non-existent bandwagon, with headlines purporting that Heseltine killed his mother's dog.

 

Lord Heseltine came back and explained they were a bunch of morons and it was a terrible misrepresentation of what actually happened.

 

This story gets a little stranger, as this incident didn't happen today, or yesterday, or this week. It happened back in 1964.

 

Lord Heseltine told BBC Radio 4, that he had been looking after Kim, his mother's dog, back in 1964. It developed a problem with its paw, so he bent down to help. It was then that "the dog flew at me, on its hind legs."

 

The dog reacted to Heseltine's help by biting him.

 

Heseltine told the magazine in his interview, "I immediately got out of my chair. There was a certain amount of blood, as he was biting my wrists. I shouted to my wife to get out of the room, as she was heavily pregnant at the time. I managed to catch the choker chain that was around his neck and, twisting that, obviously got a grip on the dog."

 

He went on to add: "It probably wasn't more than 15 seconds, he went quite limp and reverted to being the dog we all knew a loved."

 

So, the stories circulating today about Lord Heseltine strangling his dog dead are completely false.

 

However, being left with a "most awful dilemma", Heseltine had no choice.

 

The dog had to die. Even if it had reverted back to the dog he knew and loved.

 

But the death would not come by his own hands. He wasn't a dog killer, after all.

 

The following day he took it to the vet and had Kim put down. Someone else did the dirty work.

 

However, he had experienced, even if by proxy, the thrill of the kill. And there's only one way you can quench that thirst for blood. Orchestrate a squirrel massacre.

 

Earlier this month, according to BBC News, Lord Heseltine revealed he had shot 350 grey squirrels at his home in Northamptonshire.

 

At a guess, I'm guessing he lured them into his kitchen, one by one, and shouted, "Surprise, Mother Tucker," and blew their heads off with a shotgun.

 

He then mounted each of the squirrels on the wall of his study.

 

Rumours that he spends nights re-enacting his glory days in parliament with the squirrels are unconfirmed.