Re Greta's Putdown: I remember the worries in the Untied Kingdom, and the moral panic in the redtop papers, over the 1980s fashion in certain quarters for massive and nasty dogs. Rather than annoy the voters owners by reimposing the dog licence, the official outcome was the Dangerous Dogs Act, and a lot of debate ensued about quite which dogs it applied to.

I thought at the time that it would have been much cheaper to bribe some comedian to describe the offending dogs as "carnivorous penis extensions" on prime-time TV. Public ridicule would have done the rest.