Remember, the newspapers commanded, as if one might have forgotten - one minute's silence in Britain at 1.46pm. And after so much commemorative noise, some quiet for the dead of September 11 came as a decent pause in a frenzy of competitive emoting. On television, at least. Outside this office both pedestrians and traffic were pressing on; indoors it was impossible to say whether people were attempting a silent tribute or just being quiet. The purpose of the two minutes' silence when it was introduced in 1919, on the first anniversary of the armistice, was that the survivors of the great war remember their "great deliverance" from carnage. Appropriately, the commemorative silence conjured up an actual silence: the moment that gunfire stopped on the Western Front, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, 1918. George V sent a message to the people of the Commonwealth, asking that for two minutes they suspend normal activities and that "in perfect stillness the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the Glorious Dead". There were so many - between nine and 13 million, to which were later added the dead of the second world war, that even now, most of us on Remembrance Day comply with   King George's request, and focus on the loss or sacrifice of others.  Yesterday, unlike many of those whose personal testimonies of loss have now become familiar, I could not associate the attack with any personal friend or acquaintance. My mental images, each time 9/11 is mentioned, are those familiar obscenities - the first plane going into the World Trade Centre, and the thought of the agonies inside that plane: the moment Mohamed Atta thought he was going to paradise.  So elsewhere, presumably, his admirers must have been celebrating. Anniversary contributions to the letters page at the British website of the Islamic group, Al-Muhajiroun, suggest that in some quarters, joy was unconfined. "I live in Norway and I love Osama bin Ladin", writes one young man. "Tomorrow is 11 September, happy day birthday for it. Happy day, 11 September. I hate Americans." The website organisers thanked him for his contribution: "Indeed, we must all support our Muslim brothers and sisters under attack".  Like most British newspapers, the site beseeches those who log on to "Remember". Unlike them it does so with the jaunty mnemonic, "Remember, remember the 11th September", illustrating the injunction with continuous footage of the planes hitting the towers. Once you have seen this, the choice   of this moment of atrocity as a focus for sombre contemplation is almost perverse. This is slaughter, not deliverance. Should the principal moment of remembrance be the instant of the assassins' triumph?  As with the designated silences for Princess Diana, the Queen Mother, and more recently, the murdered children from Soham, yesterday's imitation of the armistice silences was the sincere expression of a desire that terrible loss or tragedy should be recognised with a commensurately dramatic exhibition of public grief. Some lingering awareness that not all tragedies should be remembered equally is still reflected in the length of silence to be enforced. For the Queen Mother, two minutes of BBC radio silence were ordained, reduced to one for listeners to Radio 1, out of respect for their limited attention span. One minute was considered sufficient for 9/11 - half as much as is awarded to all the combatants of the first and second world wars.  But inevitably, as moments of silence become like rows of twinkling nightlights, condolence books, mountains of teddies and Cellophane-wrapped flowers, the routine national response to death or murder, their ostentation undermines the impulse behind it. Phoney or coercive shows of grief will end in tears. Earlier this year, Celtic football supporters not only refused to observe a silence for the Queen Mother; they booed.<B>Why are fox fans so selective?</B> At Westminster, where the government is currently postponing a fox-hunting ban by rehearsing all the arguments for and against the sport, Professor Andrew Linzey, a cat lover and senior research fellow in theology and animals, has reminded MPs that cruelty to animals is one of a "cluster of characteristics" identified in the violent and anti-social. One of James   Bulger's killers, he points out, had been involved in cruelty to animals. Clearly, if we cannot ban foxhunting, then, we should certainly be debating whether we want a royal family composed, to the last prince, of potential sociopaths. Linzey will be dismayed to hear that such sinister disregard for animals extends far beyond the muddy, bloodstained world of Camilla Parker Bowles. Only this week, the Sun reported, a dead badger lying by the side of a road in Somerset was desecrated when - in what was described as a "callous act" - workmen painting road markings continued a white line right over its body. A Somerset council spokesman promised to investigate. "This is totally unacceptable behaviour".   Indeed. What might such people do in the future? We may pride ourselves on our donkey sanctuaries, we may cherish David Attenborough and a programme called Animal Hospital, but not until Rolf Harris fronts Animal Funeral, in which roadkill is disposed of with dignity, safe from the attentions of potentially deviant road painters, can we truly call ourselves a nation of animal lovers.  Here, surely, is a cause worthy of Linzey and his supporters once they have banned fox-hunting. A dead, cute furry animal is still a cute furry animal and thus a priority for our care. Sympathisers with the factory-farmed cows, pigs, and turkeys whose tortures constitute such a valuable part of the food chain may feel that sentient   creatures might be a more deserving cause, but as the Commons hearings are demonstrating yet again, sentimentality rather than suffering is what motivates the most vociferous animal lovers.  If suffering really counted, then the discomfort of millions of battery chickens would, of course, take priority over the interests of a few thousand stressed-out foxes. If sentience was more important than class, then anglers would be as much a target as Parker Bowles and her mates. In reality, the anti-hunting campaigners go out of their way to insist that anglers are safe from interference.  Naturally, a disproportionate interest in fox welfare is not, by itself, an indicator of mental weakness. On the other hand, my    research suggests that it is one of a cluster of characteristics that often leads to bizarre, inconsistent or downright speciesist thinking. If the Commons fox fans are truly concerned for animal welfare, where is their "I'm a Cockroach Get Me Out of Here!" campaign on behalf of the scores of maggots, stick insects, caterpillars and many other insects which have just been callously squashed, groped and eaten by much larger and more terrifying varieties of vermin, purely for the pleasure of 12 million depraved television viewers? Do the programme's traumatised snakes and hunted piggies count? Or must they, like the badger, first grow fur, then be killed and have white lines painted over them, before anyone starts to care?