Myth, legend and now folly surround the rituals of meerkats, as a new study firmly slams the browser shut on their on line behaviour.
The study was commissioned by 67 yr old Arthur Jones of Ribblesthwaite Road, Ostwaldtwistle, Lancashire who was fed up with seeing meerkats on TV talking about insurance and looking at each other on comparison websites.
"Ah bin watchin' these meerkats on telli talkin and wearin yuman clothes and all that, an ah thought, thers summat not reet about that. meerkats can't talk.... an all y'heard everywhere you went, were people laffin about meerkats and ow cute thi wer".
This led Arthur to commission a study into their behaviour to prove to people that the meerkats they see in the TV commercials were not real.
"Ah wer sick of it, kids laffin and talkin as though these things wer real. thi don't know thi born these days and thi don't know nowt neither. In my day you called a nig nog a spade, but not now, you call em black, whats all tharrabout, its all these posh sutherners wi the new fangled pc nonsense, it's gone mad I tell yer, bloody mentul"
4 meerkats of differing ages were placed in a laboratory situation and each had a superfast pcs hooked up to the internet.
"None of em, I say I say, none of em, managed to use the keyboard at all, smashin t' myth right there an then. thi wer bloody useless, one of em kept standin up to look around, thi didn't even look at t' moniter for cryin out loud. Ow are we supposed to teach kids 'owt these days, when it's all make believe an fantasy."
As the men in the white coats led Mr Jones away, he was heard to shout obscenities about Bungle from Rainbow being a man in a suit and Basil Brush being a puppet with a mans hand up his rickter "I'll fukin av yer, all the fukin lot of yer"
