THE LAST time Muriel Jakubait saw her baby sister Ruth Ellis was in Holloway prison, more than 40 years ago. The efforts to revive it show our DNA- fuelled arrogance at its worst. This was a half-horse, half-zebra creature, once plentiful in the savannahs of Southern Africa, but forced into extinction by man. Butch and Sundance, the Tamworth Two, enjoyed a low-key birthday party on Monday, complete with pig birthday cake crafted from pink marzipan.

They didn't eat it.Show of the WeekA documentary about the re-creation of the quagga. Other victims of senseless brutality were the mink, the grouse (above), and the imported Danish pigs raised in "sow stalls", the pig equivalent to a veal crate, measuring 8ft by 2ft; just about long enough for an adult pig to stand in but not to turn around.Birthday of the WeekHumans have an unlimited capacity to be hypocritical. The snake may well have been as distressed by its role in this pathetic bid to relaunch Ms Turner's career as the Boveys in a previous attempt - but no one cares about the snake. If, a few years ago, you'd offered Tatler explicit photographs of a near-naked young woman dressed only in a python, you'd probably have been referred to the vice squad (who'd have given you a pretty good price for them). The sexual exploitation of God's creatures in under-the-counter videos is one thing; Anthea Turner is another. Obviously one of life's survivors, he deserves a long and smut-free retirement. Loser of the weekMr Ferman must have had to confront many scenes of explicit bestiality in his career, which brings us to this week's losers, the animal kingdom.

He leaves us with a sensible plea to the Government to be as grown up as the rest of us are about non-violent sexual images. Anyhow at least he's still got his eyesight and the satisfaction of having fought off Mary Whitehouse and the reservoir columnists of the Mail and the Telegraph. Winner of the week When Mr James Ferman (right) was appointed to be Britain's film censor in 1975, you wonder whether he could possibly have foreseen what lay - in all senses of the word - ahead. Now that he's 68, Mr Ferman has decided to give up watching mucky movies just at the time when many men of his age are beginning to take up the hobby. It would be ingratitude on the part of the German electorate to get rid of him now. But why do they themselves not rebel against the euro, for which they will have to pay, and which supplants the deutschmark that has served them, these past 50 years, so well? It is necessary to fly from the Bismarckian example - but that far?.

Helmut Kohl has been a very lucky man, and in most ways a deservedly lucky man. There is that terrible German tendency to conform; to ignore the great matters of world politics (as over the Gulf War) and to drive "Europe" forward as a way of stopping Germans from being German. Margaret Thatcher, at the time of unification, worried publicly and privately that we were going to see all those Germanic characteristics coming to the fore again - arrogance, cupidity, militarism and marching in step.She was, of course, wrong about the nationalistic side of things; that sort of nationalism ended in 1945, and there is really no serious sign that it will ever recover Just the same, maybe she was right in another way. In political life, they have often been maddeningly tedious, and they have no vision at all about Germany that might go it alone, bringing civilisation to the east as in days of yore. These Catholics gave Germany a sensible constitution, felt strongly that their proper allies were in western Europe, and feared any resurgence of the old, Bismarckian Germany. In 1990-91, they even connived at a rather unworthy piece of legislation, to stop the old Prussian estate-owners from getting their estates back, even though the constitution guaranteed this to them.

In the later Forties, when West Germany was being established, the Catholics became the dominant element in politics, supplying Germany with her indisputably greatest figure, Konrad Adenauer, as with Helmut Kohl. Most of the time, the Catholic third of the country concentrated on local matters, sometimes forming unstable coalitions with Protestant liberals or conservatives who did not like or trust them. In his day - the background to Max Weber's Protestantism and Capitalism - the Catholics were poorer, more inclined to live in villages, less adept at education; they also faced discrimination when it came to appointments, particularly military ones (the only Catholic officer in the Prussian Guard was Franz von Papen, the man who finessed Hitler into power and he had got his position mainly through a rich wife, the heiress of the firm Villeroy & Boch which, as it happens, is still the chief manufacturer of urinal porcelain in Germany). The 19th-century German culture that had had the world in thrall has never recovered from the disaster of 1945, when the fantasy finally exploded as Germany's cities collapsed into rubble.The oddity is that German unification eventually came about again, but this time with a government dominated by the people who had consistently been Bismarck's greatest enemies - the Catholics Catholics had not been an equal part of Bismarck's empire. Saxony, perhaps not surprisingly, also acquired, in 1923, the first properly elected but partly Communist government in Europe. Bismarck shrank from proper centralisation, liberalisation and democracy; his Reich was run by irresponsible elites pursuing contradictory policies that, in the end, provoked into existence a world-wide coalition against Germany.