I didn’t know Cecil the lion personally, in fact I don’t know any lions personally. One thing I do know about Cecil though, apart from him having a ridiculously underwhelming name for such a mighty predator, is that in June 2015 American dentist Walter Palmer paid a reported $50,000 to go to Zimbabwe, shoot Cecil with a bow and arrow, later shoot him with a rifle and then cut off the lion’s head and skin. This caused some minor international outrage.

I’m not ashamed to say I googled “funny cecil the lion”

Fast forward to 5^th October as David Cameron and his cronies introduce a five pence charge on single use carrier bags across England, those scumbags. Despite seeing middle aged women posting their disgust on Facebook at this denial of what they see as a basic human right, like water or touching themselves to Fifty Shades of Grey, I for one felt like 5p was nowhere near enough. Why? You’ve got to consider the real cost of a plastic carrier bag.

In the body of water between Japan and the USA sits the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is caused by ocean currents whisking the rubbish we’ve discarded into the water and bringing it all together into swirling poisonous soup. It’s kind of like that bit in Finding Nemo where the fish ride the East Australian Current to Sydney except the fish are used condoms and Sydney is a swirling poisonous soup. It’s hard to guess how big this patch is as a lot of the debris sits just underneath the water, but the best estimates at the moment think it’s about twice the size of Texas. It’s only getting bigger too as much of it is not biodegradable, and these patches occur all over our oceans and coastlines.

So now I ask you to consider the whale. Whereas Cecil the Lion probably weighed around a measly 190kg, the average Blue Whale has a mass of 190,000kg. Whales can have tongues as heavy as an elephant and hearts as big as a car, and yet their throats are only as wide as a beach ball which limits what and how they eat. They’re like the Roomba vacuum cleaners of the sea, hoovering up teeny-tiny shrimp called krill. Unfortunately, as they hoover up the krill they can also hoover up a whole bunch of plastic such as from these floating garbage swirls, blocking a whale’s digestion system and leading to starvation and death.

I don’t need an excuse to use a gif of a cat in a shark costume on a Roomba chasing a duckling, but it’s nice to have one. This is exactly how whales feed.

Many whales die slowly and painfully this way every year, clogged up by plastic bags with a Finding Nemo dvd case protruding through their stomach wall. It’s estimated over 1 million birds and 100,000 marine animals die each year from plastic debris. Imagine if Crush hadn’t been there to guide Marlin and Dory to Sydney and had instead suffocated with a Tesco carrier bag stuck around his head. They never would have found Nemo and Squirt would have been left an orphan.

I don’t need an excuse to use this picture of a brilliant Darla Hallowen costume, so I’m not going to give one.

Fortunately there are many groups trying to find ingenious ways to combat the pollution of the oceans, my personal favourite being two cool surfer dudes from Perth who have invented this neat Seabin which automatically collects waste from marinas.

Some practical ways you can help are re-using bags for life or maybe even learning how to balance a week’s worth of shopping on your head as you walk back to your car – I don’t know how committed to this you are and I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. Ironically, you can get a free plastic bag with the purchase of live or raw fish as well as a variety of bladed goods such as axes and knives. So if Walter Palmer had been a lumberjack rather than a Dentist he could have bought an axe and received a free bag for it, using that bag to choke a whale to death and saved himself $50,000. Whales are an infinitely bigger and more impressive trophy and he could have used the money he saved to build a giant wall to mount the whale’s head on. If anything he was thinking too small with Cecil. If anything we should be charging $50,000 for plastic bags, not 5p.