Six months ago a stag was dispatched in the south of England. The locals were outraged, partly because they regarded the "Emperor of Exmoor" as something of a tourist attraction, and also because he had rather an impressive set of antlers, a 13-pointer.
This week a terrorist was killed in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden's death has provoked a similar outcry, probably not because he helped to bring in the tourists - although perhaps people will flock to Abbottabad now to see where he spent his last few days - but because the US President Barack Obama is refusing to release photos of the dead body.
But what, you might be asking, is the connection between a dead stag and the former leader of al Qa'eda? The answer, at least if you live in North America is this: statistically you stand the same chance of being killed by a deer as you do by a terrorist.
John Mueller, a professor of political science, and Mark Stewart, a professor of civil engineering, are due to publish a book called Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits and Costs of Homeland Security.
Beyond noting that the title is a mouthful, some of their conclusions, an extract of which was published in the journal Foreign Affairs, are startling.
"Americans are twice as likely to perish in a natural disaster and nearly a thousand times more likely to be killed in some type of accident," they write.
Now I'm fairly sure that whoever took out the Exmoor stag was not some do-gooder trying to ensure he did not cause an accident on the road, but a bounty hunter who wanted to hang the antlers on the walls of his billiard room. Nor can the cost of terminating said stag's time on Earth have been that expensive. All that was needed was a Mannlicher-Schoenauer and a couple of cartridges.
I had often mused on a dull Thursday afternoon that it would be a good money-spinner to nip over to the Tora Bora caves or wherever the al Qa'eda leader was holed up, point out his whereabouts to the US Navy Seals, and be back in time for work on Sunday millions of dollars richer. That sort of cash might even keep my wife in cosmetics.
If I'd known he was in Pakistan, the same distance from the capital Islamabad as Reading is from London, I'd definitely have gone.
It would have been a bargain for the Americans too. In hindsight the bounty of US$25 million (Dh91.8m) was too low. They should have offered $100 billion.
They could always have followed the example of Harry Flashman, admittedly a fictional character, who made his name as a duelling hero in the British Army, having first bribed one of the seconds to remove the shot from his opponent's weapon. When said second tried to collect the promised sum, Flashman told him to go hang himself and threatened to denounce him as a cad for even considering such a pernicious act.
But to take out bin Laden and ensure the security of America, Messrs Mueller and Stewart estimate the US has so far spent $1 trillion, and that excludes the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The War on Terror has provided rather a nice boondoggle for a range of suppliers, from spies to security men to scanners at airports. To justify the amount that is being spent, they suggest there would need to be an attack on the scale of the September 11 2001 attacks every year.
Opponents of this argument would probably say that it is just because such a sum is being spent that we can all sleep safely in our beds.
Personally I'd be willing to take a bit more risk and rather less time waiting in line at airports, taking my shoes on and off, sometimes taking my laptop out of the briefcase but sometimes not bothering - why can't airports make up their minds on this crucial matter? Surely if it's going through an X-ray machine you can see through the leather case?
In any event, those who benefit from this budget bonanza were keen to dismiss Osama's death as the end of the struggle.
"The attacks are still going on against our troops. The networks are still operating. Al Qa'eda is still operating," said Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman. "So it goes on."
A colleague reminded me this week of the famous scene in Apocalypse Now with Robert Duvall playing the crazed army commander Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore. We all remember that he sniffs the air at one point and exults: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning … The smell, you know that gasoline smell … Smells like … victory."
But what my colleague pointed out was that after that he says, almost to himself: "Some day this war is gonna end", and you can tell he doesn't like that thought.
This War on Terror doesn't look like it is going away anytime soon. I'm not sure the stags in the forest are sleeping any easier either.
