“Send the buggers back! That’s what I say!” declares Adam Fruitlite, who represents the extreme right wing English Defence League (EDL) as a councillor on Merseyside, in response to the latest outrage involving an unprovoked attack on a white working class person. “It is the only way to stop more horrendous unprovoked attacks like the one the other day. Where will it end, I ask you? It’s some poor pensioner mauled to death in his back garden by an out-of-control dog today, tomorrow it could be packs of the furry fiends rampaging through our schools, savaging children to death!” Fruitlite has been widely quoted in the local press as believing that the attack on the pensioner could have been racially motivated. “You notice the police aren’t revealing what type the dog concerned was – they obviously fear a backlash against the breed,” he told the North Western Fisherman’s Gazette. “I’m betting it was a bloody foreign breed – German Shepherd, maybe, or, even worse, a bloody Afghan! They need to check whether the old boy savaged to death was an ex-soldier. If he was over eighty, I’d put my money on a German Shepherd – the war, you know. They’ve never bloody forgiven us for winning.” The councillor has already called upon local police to round up all the other German Shepherds in the area and send them back to Germany. “Let’s face it, it is where they belong,” he declared a recent council meeting. “They’re their dogs, let them deal with the vicious bastards.”

However, German Shepherds aren’t the only breed of canine the EDL representative has in his sights. “ Of course, if the victim had been younger, I’d have suspected an Afghan hound – you just can’t trust those hairy bastards!” he told a local TV news bulletin. “God knows what weaponry they’ve got lurking under all that fur – probably several pounds of semtex for a suicide bombing mission, I’ll wager. If it had been an Afghan, we’d have to be asking if it had been radicalised at Muslim-run kennel prior to the attack!” Despite such comments bringing ridicule from political opponents, Fruitlite is adamant that he has evidence of dog breeds of foreign origin being radicalised in the area. “Everybody knows that Asian bloke who runs that dog walking business in Birkenhead is some kind of radical rag head preacher,” he told an EDL rally last week. “Three time in the past six months he’s made complaints about people daubing anti-Muslim slogans on the wall of his local Mosque and has called for anyone caught doing it to be prosecuted – he clearly wants to suppress England’s tradition of free speech and introduce Sharia law! I’ve no doubt that he and his acolytes are busy indoctrinating the dogs they walk with this kind of nonsense, brainwashing them into attacking their English owners!”

Undeterred by political opponents pointing out that the alleged ‘radical Muslim preacher’ is in fact a much respected local Sikh businessman, Fruitlite maintains that he has evidence of dogs being ‘radicalised’ in the kennels he runs. “A bloke who drinks in my local pub delivers the dog food to the kennels in Birkenhead and he swears that he has seen dogs there being trained to attack the Union Jack,” he told a local radio interviewer. “They were all foreign breeds, of course: German Shepherds, Afghans, Rottweilers, Scottie dogs, that sort of thing. He said there were definitely no indigenous breeds like Bulldogs or Old English Sheepdogs – they’re obviously too patriotic to be duped into that sort of behaviour.” Fruitlite has also alleged that some dogs are being shipped overseas by this and other ‘radical kennels’ for terrorist training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Whilst their owners are enjoying a holiday in Ibiza, their pets are busy being taught to eat plastic explosive so that they can shit out bombs which will explode when some bastard slips on them on the pavement!” he claims. “Of course, there’s nothing new in these camps. It’s well known that back in the 1970s Irish Wolfhounds were sent to training camps in Libya by the IRA.”

However, rival extremist Brian Jackupp – a prospective council candidate for the British National Party (BNP) – has advanced an alternative theory to explain the original attack. “Personally, I think that there’s a good chance that it wasn’t a dog at all that attacked the old man,” he opined in a letter to the North Western Fisherman’s Gazette. “Can it really be a coincidence that only a few days before, in the next county, a tiger had fatally mauled a keeper at a zoo? Could it be that the attack was actually staged by the tiger to get hold of the keys to the enclosures and now it is letting itself out and wandering around the North West savaging people?” His intervention in the debate has been condemned by Fruitlite. “It is quite obvious that he is seeking to use the tragic death of this poor pensioner as a platform to advance his own crackpot political agenda,” he wrote in response. “It is utterly ludicrous to suggest that foreign big cat could be committing attacks on unsuspecting pensioners. Why on earth would they do such a thing?”

“OK, I know there’s a question as to motive – unless the pensioner had once been a big game hunter who had massacred the big cat’s family back in Bengal, or wherever it came from, back in the day – but that’s a minor point,” Jackupp responded in the letters column. “Actually, it could be some kind of vendetta against dogs – the victim was purely incidental. The tiger disguised itself as a dog, then savaged some random target to death, leaving some neighbourhood dog to take the blame.” The BNP is confident that the police are already onto the tiger’s nefarious schemes. “They seem to be taking a lot of interest in the mauling of the zoo keeper, with a full investigation being launched,” he wrote. “Even now, they’ve probably got that tiger in an interrogation room, shining a light in face and slapping him around. Serves the murderous bastard right. They should send the bugger back! He’s probably an illegal immigrant any way – too many of these foreign so called ‘exotic’ animals are being allowed into the country on the grounds that they are ‘endangered’. All they do when they get here is lounge around all day being fed meat, making no contribution to the economy. It’s about time the government started cracking down on wildlife immigration – they’re threatening the jobs of hard-working indigenous species!” The comments of both Jackupp and Fruitlite have been condemned by Mercia Constabulary, who are blaming them for a series of recent hate attacks on exotic dog breeds.