The Story of the Castrated Lion

Mike Pethar over at Jawa:

This week, a battle in the gender war was won by the women. The heraldic lion on the coat of arms of the Nordic Battlegroup has been castrated.

Ouch!

The armed forces agreed to emasculate the lion after a group of women from the rapid reaction force lodged a complaint to the European Court of Justice, Goteborgs-Posten reports.But although the army was eventually happy to make the changes in the interests of gender equality, the artist who designed the insignia was less than pleased.

“A heraldic lion is a powerful and stately figure with its genitalia intact and I cannot approve an edited image,” Vladimir A Sagerlund from the National Archives told Goteborgs-Posten.

Sagerlund blasted the army for making changes to the coat of arms without his permission.

“The army lacks knowledge about heraldry. Once upon a time coats of arms containing lions without genitalia were given to those who betrayed the Crown,” said Sagerlund.

But the castrated lion has already won the day and is now worn on the arms of all soldiers in the battle group’s Swedish battalions.

“We were given the task of making sure the willy disappeared,” Christian Braunstein from the army’s ‘tradition commission’ told Goteborgs-Posten.

“We were forced to cut the lion’s willy off with the aid of a computer,” he added.

I would take this as a sure sign of idiocy. or, at the least, a lack of understanding of history, and the references that our symbolism makes to it.  I cannot imagine that they completely thought the matter through.  The lion in the picture having his procreation equipment fully intact is not about patriarchy, but about continuance.

There’s this, also. Those of you who keep cats, as I do here, should consider the personality changes, which occur once an animal is “Fixed”…  the animal becomes much more docile, much less territorial, much less willing to fight to maintain its own survival. It sits around at stares at you all day, merely looking for it’s next handout.

Hmmm. Ya know… That picture being altered so is actually kind of handy, then, given that the whole of Europe just got through signing away its sovereignty yesterday.  A castrated lion suits the situation quite well, after all.

Never mind. Nothing to see, here, Citizens. Move along.