He shoots, he scores!

Once again, the World Cup is upon us, a phenomenon easily recognized by ubiquitous England flags, a plethora of pointless memorabilia and an alarming tendency on the part of devotees to talk in meaningless cliches.

Meanwhile, every commercial enterprise which can squeeze in some connection, however tenuous, is making use of World Cup fever to bring in the punters. Thus Hatton Country World decided this week to anticipate England's first fixture with a match between two opposing teams of guinea pigs.

The idea, apparently, was to predict the result using animals; this is always a crowd-pleaser during the football tournament and guaranteed to draw the visitors. The ancient Romans, of course, had much the same idea, only with more entrails.

Twenty-two of the little animals were selected for the England-Italy match, dressed in tiny team strip and given a ball full of grass to play with. (The final score, for anyone who may unaccountably be interested, was England 0 - Italy 1.)

However, much as often happens in the human game, events on the pitch have been overshadowed by the headline-grabbing priapic antics of one of the squad.

To the surprise of staff, some of their carefully-segregated females were recently discovered to be pregnant. Further research revealed that a lone male had somehow found his way into their pen, where he clearly made the most of the opportunities on offer:

"We don’t know how long Randy was in the female enclosure but it could have been several weeks which would have given him time to go round the entire female population."

The park, according to reports, is currently home to around 300 guinea pigs housed in an assortment of anthropomorphic settings to entertain youngsters, though one might have thought that, after the first hundred or so, guinea pig fatigue must surely set in for even the most obsessive child.

Now, thanks to Randy's contribution of up to 100 potential pregnancies (outstripping - one hopes - even Tyneside bus-stop Lothario Keith MacDonald), the population looks set to double over the next few months.

Staff are now looking to build an extension to the guinea pig farm to accommodate Randy’s huge brood.

Hence all the media publicity, presumably; it will surely take a fair few entrance fees to house and feed them all.

Unless, of course, the management have other plans. From Wikipedia:

Guinea pig meat is high in protein and low in fat and cholesterol, and is described as being similar to rabbit and the dark meat of chicken.

A Vole Lotta Lovin'

There's more proof this week that science can be fun; a group of researchers decided to host a drunken swingers' party for prairie voles.

In an experiment that follows in the noble tradition of levitating mice, stoned spiders and cinema-going ferrets, the usually monogamous voles were plied with drink in an attempt to establish the effects of alcohol on social relationships.

What is particularly interesting is that the scientists have found that, given a choice between dilute alcohol (essentially vodka) and water, the little furry chaps hit the bottle with relish (or as the study more sedately puts it, 'prairie voles voluntarily self-administer substantial amounts of alcohol').

24 hours later, when all the voles were pleasantly pickled, the scientists removed them from their current partners and set them up on a three-hour blind date with someone new, all the while closely observing their amorous activities.

According to their findings, inebriated females would rather snuggle up to their usual boyfriends for reassurance while drunken males, in an altogether more laid-back fashion, are happy to go out on the pull.

Both sexes tend to get more affectionate with drink, and possibly rather less discriminating too: 'the authors found no evidence that alcohol-related aggression, impaired locomotor activity (e.g. stumbling) or passing out played a role in determining whether two voles became a steady couple.'

I can't help feeling that an observational trip or two to Britain's town centres on a Saturday night would have furnished them with much the same information - though obtaining the requisite brains to dissect for confirmation would have been rather more problematical.

It must, I think, come as something of a shock to the Righteous to discover that, far from being an unnatural and peculiarly human vice, the enthusiastic consumption of alcohol appears to be hardwired into other animals - it's just that only we have yet evolved sufficiently to invent the off-licence.

Vermin in Westminster - again

What do you do when you've got mice? Get a cat, of course. At least that was the suggestion Lord Elton put forward to deal with a rodent infestation in the Palace of Westminster.

There's a pleasing touch of Schadenfreude in considering that all those expenses-guzzling MPS may be getting a £1,000 pay rise, but they've also got free-range mice in their offices, tea-rooms and subsidised bars.

So last week, Lord Elton asked the Chairman of Committees 'whether consideration will be given to acquiring a number of respectable cats to reduce the rodent population of the Palace of Westminster'.

Not, you will notice, any old moggies or battle-scarred toms - only the best for our ruling elite. Sadly for this picturesque image, Lord Brabazon of Tara was adamant:

The possible use of cats, respectable or otherwise, to control the rodent population in the Palace of Westminster has been considered and rejected on a number of practical grounds. For example, the cats would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice; there would be nothing ...to stop them walking on desks in offices and on tables in restaurants and bars; they can carry fleas and other parasites; and many people are allergic to cat hair.

His Lordship is, I suspect, not a cat-lover. Sadly we are to be denied the delightful concept of cats - honest, decent and beyond reproach - patrolling the corridors of power and removing intrusive vermin, since the problem is to be tackled with poison instead.

I feel there may be some kind of metaphor there.

No Parachutes for Algernon

Can you build an anti-gravity machine for mice? It sounds like one of those questions you’d ask in the pub, but those clever scientists at JPL have done just that.

Not content with making frogs hover in mid-air – who said science was boring? – they’re using magnets to suspend mice above the floor of a specially designed cage to study the physical effects of weightlessness on mammals.

A superconducting magnet generates a field which levitates the water inside living tissue and the rest of the animal goes along for the ride, so to speak. Which is probably a good thing, really, particularly for the mouse.

Their first subject became agitated and disoriented – wouldn’t you? – so the next mice to try it were sedated. Just imagine what was going through their tiny, stoned rodent minds; ‘Hey man, I think I’m flying! No, really!’

The plan is to continue the experiment long enough to study the long-term effects of a zero-g environment. What we don't know is what will happen to their brains - experiments have shown that exposure to magnetic fields can affect brain activity and can duplicate effects sometimes described as profound religious experiences.

Who knows? This could be the beginning of a spiritually enlightened super-mouse.

101 uses for a Dead Mouse

In another strange bit of news classification - on a par with this gem - the unpleasant discovery of a dead mouse in a malt loaf has been placed by BBC news in 'Northern Ireland Politics'.

As the deceased rodent was the subject of a court case, it seems that it automatically qualifies as political news. Since the BBC has at its disposal a juggernaut of news-gathering machinery, are we to assume that the same resources were brought to this story that would normally be deployed for rather more momentous events?

For those of us who grew up to the constant soundtrack of reports of Northern Ireland's sectarian violence, there is something truly satisfying in the knowledge that things are currently peaceful enough for journalists to go out and report on dead mice.