The McHippo Protest

Posted by bb on Sunday 20th of July 2008 at 8:37 am;.
Filed Under Rants 

According to that bastion of quality reporting, The Sun, there has been a bit of a kerfuffle in a McDonalds in Castlepoint, UK.

Apparently, Mama Hippo (pictured below) was in McDonalds when her precious little cherub was hungry so started to breast feed the baby. This upset the manager and he asked her to stop. She refused and was then asked to leave. She then returned with 4 of her mates and staged the McHippo Breastfeeding Protest.

I'd hit it. In the face;. With a 2x4. With some rusty nails in it

Now before we get all of our panties up in bunch about how breastfeeding is the most natural thing in the world and that your precious little Johnny has the right to suckle on your tit until he is 15, I’m not moaning about breastfeeding in public.

What I am moaning about is those that think they have a god given right to impose their choices on others. Personally, unless you’re Megan Fox, I don’t want to see you breastfeeding. I equally have the right not to have to watch you try and manoeuvre your engorged mammories into your screaming sprog’s face.

We don’t know the exact situation in McDonalds. If the manager said “Oi, you salad dodging hippo – put it away or get the f%^& out” then, apart from the salad dodging, he was completely wrong. If he approached her and said “Excuse me ma’am, your breast feeding is causing some patrons to feel a little awkward, may I move you to another table where you may continue more comfortably” and she refused then as far as I am concerned he was right to kick her fugly ass to the kerb.

Even worse was her refusal to leave once asked to. Personally I think the manager should have called the police, but I can understand that McDonalds would shun that kind of publicity.

Anyway – since she didn’t go straight to a “no win no fee” lawyer to sue for having her feelings hurt, I can assume that he didn’t call her a salad dodger. Since she returned with her mates to ‘protest’/get tickets to appear on Jeremy Kyle/appear in The Sun, I shall assume that she felt ‘offended’.

There are lots of things that are perfectly allowable, but not acceptable in a polite society. If one person in a restaurant is making many others uncomfortable, then the one must stop or leave. If I were a forensic pathologist, and spent the entire meal in a restaurant talking loudly to my wife about the bloated corpse I had cut up that day which was found to contain several dozen pus-filled tumours – would I have the right to complain if the manager said to me that my conversation was unsettling other diners and would I please refrain? Well – yes. Should I? No. I should stop, ask to be re-seated and in the event a more private table was not available, I should accept that the room is not filled with people who think it is an appropriate topic for conversation over a meal and desist.

I should not return with my entire lab, several case reports and a bunch of megaphones.

The same applies if I decide to whistle out of tune whilst sat next to you in McDonalds. If it is upsetting the other patrons, the manager has every right to come and see me and tell me to quit it. Yes whistling is the most natural thing in the world, yes there are no laws against it – but it still doesn’t make it acceptable for me to enforce my tuneless whitterings on an unwilling public.

Something that upsets about McDonald’s attitude to all this is :

If another customer ever expressed their discomfort about breastfeeding we would encourage them to move rather than the mum.

WTF? WTFF? I’m sat there enjoying my Happy Meal with free toy and Jabba the Hutt’s missus rocks up and starts burning my retinas. To make matters worse it then starts feeding what in this case looks remarkably like a goblin … and I have to move?!?!. If I turn up in a Mcdonalds, start complaining loudly about how ‘a thousand years ago, if you gave birth to something that ugly you would have been burnt at the stake by the church’, should they move her because I’m making her feel awkward? No – I suspect not. So why the double standards?

But I suspect equally that Maddie Reynolds doesn’t consider others much. I can tell this because a) she bred and b) she doesn’t wear a burkha.

Bon Appetit! 😉


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