Badgers and Squirrels and Iran, Oh My!

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TAPPED has a great post today summing up all the crazy animal-related foreign policy news of the past week. The lead items? Iran accusing the U.S. of using trained squirrels as spies, and the belief, widely held by the inhabitants of Basra in southern Iraq, that the British military has released man-eating badgers into the city.

The U.S. and the British have denied all squirrel- and badger-related activity (one Foreign Office official called the squirrel story “nuts”), but suspicions remain. From one of TAPPED’s commentators, on a British spokesman’s statement that “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”:

That’s sort of a lawyerly non-denial denial, isn’t it? Maybe the badgers eat women and children, but not men.

Good point. Reminiscent of the famed (and possibly fake) killer dolphins set loose by Katrina.

— Nick Baumann

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