What Australians do to sheep

The Telegraph’s doctor, James Le Fanu (whose name, according to Google Translate, means “The Fanu”) is a constant mine of information.

“The recently featured complaint of a gentleman whose mornings on the golf course are punctuated by loud belching remains, regrettably, unexplained,” he says this morning.

I myself am not a golfer, and I’m not sure if I really want to be if my daily constitutional on the links is likely to be disturbed by eructating Telegraph readers.

But that’s by the by. One of The Fanu’s readers, retired doctor David Knights from Plymouth, shares his case history: laid low, while on holiday in Sri Lanka, by diarrhoea, his symptoms cleared with antibiotics but he was left with a churning gut and frequent loud belching. This carried on for a couple of years…[yeah, yeah, get on with it]…until, listening to Farming Today, he heard an Australian vet talking about his belching sheep. “I got in touch and explained that I seemed to be behaving like one of his flock,” he writes. The vet suggested his bowel infection might have interfered with the gut enzymes for metabolising sugars, causing him to be intolerant of fructose. A test dose of orange juice immediately brought on his symptoms, and his gut problems settled on reducing his sugar intake.”

What I want to know is how did the Aussie vet know this, unless he had been force-feeding his sheep orange juice? I’ve had knowledge of several sheep in my time, but none willingly partook of a glass of Tropicana, even the morning after. This seems cruel maltreatment of a dumb animal. I shall certainly write to the dumb animals at PETA about it.

Personally, I’m glad my lamb chops come from New Zealand. They treat their sheep to a nice little Cloudy Bay Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.

Hung, drawn and quartered

In the frame: The Facts in the Case of Dr Andrew Wakefield

Cartoonist Darryl Cunningham has come up a seriously good comic book overview of the whole sorry MMR-autism-Wakefield saga here. Needless to say, the MSM do not come well out of it – apart from the noble Brian Deer, the Sunday Times and Channel 4.