By Tony Wright
You'd think a chap who once played Edward Scissorhands might have found a more imaginative way of primping his fugitive pet dogs than sending them off to a poodle groomer, but that was Johnny Depp's big mistake.
When word reached Barnaby Joyce that the outlaw pups, Boo and Pistol, had been seen getting the treatment at a Brisbane poodle beautician's emporium, he instantly declared an emergency.
Operation Turn Around the Dogs swung into action.
"It's time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States," declared Mr Joyce, ever the diplomat.
Johnny Depp, who appeared in Edward Scissorhands alongside Winona Ryder, once mused that "the only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants".
Australia's fearsome Minister for Agriculture, threatening to have the Yorkshire terriers liquidated if they weren't out of the country in 50 hours, didn't mention Manus Island.
Even the impish pirate Jack Sparrow, Depp's ever-so-slightly camp Pirates of the Caribbean character famed for getting himself out of the stickiest jams, would have a hard time stepping around Barnaby's wrath.
Depp, said Barnaby, might have been named the 'sexiest man alive' twice, but that didn't give him the right to smuggle his dogs into Australia in his private plane without doing what every other international dog fancier had to do, which was to get a permit and place the animals in quarantine. Why, they could bring rabies into the country.
Depp is in Brisbane filming the latest episode of the Pirates of the Caribbean.
He seems unlikely to be willing to tempt Barnaby to take a blunderbuss to his pooches.
Depp once mused that "the only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants".
Awwww.
Australia's fearsome Minister for Agriculture, threatening to have the Yorkshire terriers liquidated if they weren't out of the country in 50 hours, didn't mention Manus Island.