The Director of London Zoo, Professor Tim Blackburn, has made available a team of researchers and is keen to lead the breeding programme. He said, ‘After being sent a link to the Wikipedia page I have to say I was shocked. I knew numbers were down, but to find out they could disappear from these islands completely left me with no alternative but to act now.’

In order to establish breeding populations, the teams will be heading to those parts of Britain where gingers can still be found living in the wild. One isolated group based in the Highlands of Scotland are thought to represent the purest line, so these individuals will be targeted first to ensure the ancestral gene is protected from further dilution.

‘Catching the specimens is just the first problem,’ continued Professor Blackburn, ‘Gingers kept in captivity are renowned for their reluctance to breed. So we’ll be adapting a few tricks that have been used to good effect with pandas where researchers found that playing the pairings videos of other pandas mating stimulated activity. We’re trying our best to source some good quality ginger porn which is so far proving to be much more difficult than we’d anticipated, but a couple of our research assistants are pulling 12 hour shifts tirelessly trawling the internet.’

In any breeding programme it is critical to ensure the stress levels of the animals remains at a minimum. Therefore the zookeepers who interact with the exhibits will wear ginger wigs whenever they enter the enclosures. In addition Professor Blackburn advised that, ‘zoos will also provide parasols and gazebos under which the gingers can escape the harmful glare of the sun. Otherwise the costs involved in supplying sun cream would have made the conservation effort completely unworkable.’

As his team attempts to unpick the root cause behind the demise of the ginger gene, Professor Blackburn conceded, ‘It is obviously not going to come down to one single factor, but early indications point strongly towards global warming, habitat degradation and Mick Hucknall.’

Red Squirrels are now almost completely extinct in England, barring a few isolated off-shore colonies in islands such as Anglesey and the Isle of Man. But finally the red squirrels are leading a fight back. Rodent intelligence sources suggest they are planning a three pronged attack on the British mainland, eventually linking up with reds in the Scottish highlands, then to march south and confront the grey squirrels in large numbers.

However the invasion plans have met with the early hitch in that the Isle of Wight squirrels are unable to cross the Solent, and the reds have now appealed to Britain’s human population to supply little boats and acorn-sized grenades.

The squirrels are particularly hoping for support from their human ‘ginger brothers’ who ‘know all about persecution’ to join their ranks for the big counter-offensive. However, the British government seems unwilling to become dragged into another messy sectarian war, particularly against American squirrels. ‘If they were Islamic squirrels, it might be different.’

Davster