It was suggested by Tom Whipple in The Times on Tuesday that we must all be surprised to learn (as a consequence of observations by researchers at the University of Queensland) that sawfish use their sharp serrated snouts in an aggressive fashion with their prey. Up till now, said Whipple, we had believed them to be “a benign tool used to rake the sand for crustaceans”.

Actually, Tom, I believed nothing of the sort. I had always known sawfish to be savage attackers of ships, pirate ships especially. Their speciality is sending boats to the bottom through the carving of large circular holes on the deck. I have seen this done countless times — in cartoons.

In these, the fish always appear (as below) with the serrations only on one side of the snout, thus rendering it more sawlike. This is an image as potent and enduring as the huge bones of a form never seen in real life — perfect in symmetry, with identical rounded ends — but always found in the mouths, or outside the kennels, of cartoon dogs.