What's that, Skippy? We've gone overboard about a kangaroo story?

PRESENT TENSE:IT WOULD HAVE been far, far easier to take the wallaby-in-a-nightclub story more seriously if Tuesday's Livelinehadn't featured the funniest conversation you will hear this year. Fiona Squibb of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was pitted against Alexander Scholl, owner of Circus Sydney.

They had clashed before, so each treated the other as an arch-nemesis. Their encounter was too detailed in its strangeness, too intricately bizarre, to do it justice here. At times, Squibb gasped and sighed. She almost tutted in a way that wasn’t entirely un-Skippy-like.

The main point of contention hinged on this key discussion:

“Was that your wallaby?”

“It was a man in a kangaroo suit.”

You may pause and presume that such a conversation, being both ludicrous and easily resolvable, would have come to a halt there and then. Thankfully not. Instead Joe Duffy guided the row brilliantly, with deliberate sobriety and an occasional deadpan line.

Scholl suggested that, to a drunken Irish person (greeted by a strangled gasp from the animal-rights person) a man in a kangaroo suit is pretty hard to distinguish from apouch-sporting, clown-footed wallaby. Come to my show and have a look at the suit, he urged, and this will become clear to you.

Here’s an experiment you should try this weekend. You and a friend dress as a pantomime horse and wander through a nightclub at 2am. Rub against some dancers. Eat some sugar cubes. Clop around. See if anybody shouts “Horse!”

Anyway, the Livelinerow was 30 minutes of comedy brilliance. It was the epitome of a kind of giddiness that afflicts us whenever a strange animal story, especially one of animal cruelty, pops up.

Is animal cruelty funny? Of course not. Do we get a kick out of the aftermath? You bet.

It depends somewhat on the nature of what has gone on. As with Mary Bale putting the cat in the bin, a requisite dollop of strangeness is the magic ingredient that makes an ordinary tale of animal abuse something truly worth half a week’s news coverage.

Here are some further highlights from the week in wallabies. Before a news report, RTÉ warned viewers that some people might find the images they were about to see disturbing. Cut to fuzzy pictures of some pixelated idiot manhandling a marsupial on a dance floor. Then two experts – including, delightfully, a real-life Australian – denounced the behaviour in the footage. And finally, to make sure we were truly distressed by the blurred shots of the wallaby in an unnatural environment, the report showed them again.

Several organisations, at home and abroad, ran the story along the lines of Metro Herald's headline: "Did disco kangaroo die after being fed ecstasy?"

And, like that Metro Heraldstory, they waited several paragraphs before quoting the Garda as saying there was no evidence to suggest the animal was dead. But, hey, animal cruelty and the drugs menace in one: it's too good to resist.

With the video clips and news stories came the comments. “These scumbags hopefully experience the same humiliation when it comes to their deaths,” wrote one contributor. “Hanging is too good for these subhumans. To treat a defenceless animal like this is gut-wrenchingly disgusting.” Another offered: “The human race in general make me quite sick. Many of them are sick themselves. Shame they can’t just be shot!”

In the UK, Mary Bale was fined £250 for her cat-in-the-bin lapse, an incident so instantly famous that Sky News staff took a two-day sabbatical while the channel just stuck the CCTV footage on a loop. Bale has since left her job, become a hate figure and found herself on the receiving end of the kind of international media coverage once reserved for war criminals. The extent of the punishment far outstrips anything she did. She has become a victim of a feeding frenzy. The moral: if you’re going to be cruel to an animal, it won’t make the news if you just kick the thing. So don’t try to be creative. And check for CCTV cameras first.

Meanwhile, the week’s many stories of cruelty to humans will have gone largely unreported. It’s an aspect of our nature that we’ll rush along to a hotel where a lone wallaby has been mistreated but walk, head down, through crowds of junkies dealing with one hand and holding buggies with the other. That situation’s complexity, intractability, sadness and familiarity are no longer worth a comment. But a wallaby is worth a thousand words. And then some.