Wanna crack my nuts???

Crack-crazed squirrels terrorise South London

By Lester Haines (lester.haines at theregister.co.uk)

Published Monday 10th October 2005 09:56 GMT

Stop me if you've heard this one: crack-addicted squirrels are terrorising Brixton in Sarf London in a desperate search for a fix, eschewing their traditional nuts and digging up residents' front gardens in what appears to be a credible zoological threat to the Yardies' hard-drug hegemony.

Yup, crack dealers and addicts have apparently taken to burying their stashes in people's gardens in the streets around the centre of Brixton after a police clampdown drove them from the thriving commercial heart of the popular London district. Locals have spotted squirrels digging in the same gardens, prompting speculation that they are already addicted to rocks and will in due course take up semi-automatic weapons and launch a violent challenge for the whole trade in illicit narcotics, as is the local custom.

One fearful resident, who asked not to be named, told Life Style Extra: "I was chatting with my neighbour who told me that crack users and dealers sometimes use my front garden to hide bits of their stash. An hour earlier I'd seen a squirrel wandering round the garden, digging in the flowerbeds. It looked like it knew what it was looking for. It was ill-looking and its eyes looked bloodshot but it kept on desperately digging. It was almost as if it was trying to find hidden crack rocks."

The RSPCA said it had no reports of the "Brixton Crack Squirrel", but did not completely dismiss the idea. A spokeswoman said: "We have not had any dealers reporting the theft of their stash by squirrels but the animal is attracted by smell and if it detects something it likes it will dig it up. If a squirrel did open a bag of crack and start consuming it there is no doubt it would die pretty quickly. I suspect that nobody has reported it because they are a wild animal and when they are found dead no-one cares."

That's right - just another junkie off the streets, permanently.

But hold a minute: this fearful tale bears an uncanny resemblance to reports knocking about on the internet of similar cocaine-fuelled squirrels menacing New York and Washington DC. Urban myth or chilling portent? After all, it's a small step from crack squirrels to flocks of PCP-demented pigeons descending Hitchcock-style on the World's major centres of population. Consider yourselves warned. ®