I knew my cat was dippy

More than half of all cats over age 15 are bloody senile!

Most, if not all, mammals, can suffer age-related conditions normally associated with people, and in the case of cats, the main difference is that a 15-year-old individual can be compared to an 85-year-old person. (About half of all octogenarians show signs of dementia.)

The Journal of Small Animal Practice states that behaviors associated with senility in cats range from acting disoriented to changes in their social relationships, to shifting sleep habits, inappropriate vocalizing, forgetting commands, breaking housetraining, pacing, wandering, sluggishness, unusual interest or disinterest in food, and decreased grooming and confusion.

Danielle Gunn-Moore, head of the Feline Clinic at the University of Edinburgh’s Hospital for Small Animals, also says “They get confused with things, such as forgetting that they have just been fed.”

So now we know, domestic cats develop Alzheimer’s, just like their owners.

I knew my old moggy was a bit dippy, he’s taken to stealing my fish oil capsules. It’s enough to make me screw the top on my sherry bottle tighter.

Lock up your livestock

Beryl, who goes to Bingo with me, firmly believes in the recent sightings of Blessed Virgin Mary, but she’s worried that her framed velvet Mary art and hot pink plastic rosaries won’t save her budgerigars from the Chupacabra.

Granted, the reports of mysterious Goatsuckers in my neighbourhood are few and far between, but all the same I intend to keep my Border Collie inside at night.

Dreadful attacks have been perpetrated by the Chupacabra, which always involve slain livestock with telltale marks on their necks. The victims, most often goats and chickens, are reportedly drained of all their blood, but are otherwise left intact.

I tried to tell Beryl that these creatures only plague various regions of Puerto Rico and other faraway places of a similar rural nature, but she says the Chupacabra has kangaroo-like qualities, so they must be local.

I may borrow a set of rosaries myself.

Summer is i- cumen in. Lhude sing blowfly

Summer is i-cumen in –/ Lhude sing, blowfly!/ Groweth sed and bloweth med/ And springth the wude nu./ Sing, blowfly!

Today I heard the first blow-fly of Summer.

While people in other climes use swallows to signify the warmer season, here we know the date by the humblie blowie. Ugly though this creature is, it signifies all of the delights that bound in with Summer.

Members of this unattractive family are known as bluebottles, clusterflies, greenbottles, and (in Britain and Australia) as blue-arsed flies. The name blow-fly comes from an older English term for meat that had eggs laid on it, which was said to be fly blown. (maggotty)

If you really need to know, the eggs are yellowish or white, and when laid, look like rice balls. The female blow-fly typically lays around 2,000 eggs during the course of her life. Watch out for little rice balls in your lamb sandwich.

Apparently the natural life history of the blowflies remains a largely untapped body of research. I hope it stays that way.

… And not a drop to drink

“I think it’s time we started taking notice of a grave threat to the environment. The consumption of bottled water in this country has grown in the past 25 years from less than a million bottles a year to more than a billion per annum.”

It is estimated that about one-fifth of these bottles are thrown away with the top screwed tightly down and an average of one ounce of water remaining inside.

Given that these plastic bottles are airtight, nonbiodegradable containers, this means that the water contained inside is withdrawn from the planet’s hydrosystem for the next 10 million years.

If present trends continue, it is estimated that within the next 400,000 years, not only will all the planet’s carbon be tied up in the plastic of these discarded water bottles, but also the entirety of the world’s oceans will be locked up inside these bottles.

The result is that humans of that future era will spend their lives swimming through an ocean of plastic water bottles, continually opening bottles to scavenge water, one ounce at a time.

Promiscuity Rules

So now it’s official, the way to teach sex education is by observing Nature. Like the Birds and the Bees. Or more correctly, the Birds, the Bees and the Broadbeans. Promiscuity Rules!

It’s all to do with evolution, and how species arise, and hybridisation. Virtually all plants are distinct species, yet some are in the promiscuous habit of creating new hybrids with other plants.

But in case you didn’t know this, promiscuity is more successful for animals than it is for plants.

Cross species mating is common in ducks, North American fresh water fish species, whiptail lizards in the American Southwest and Bynoe’s Geckos in Australia. Even butterflies get into it.

I must have intuitively realised the significance of this animal behaviour when I was young and carefree. Of course all this doonah- dancing is past me nowadays, I can hardly remember what all the fuss was about.

Awful pets

The Gastropod thing is getting worse.

Imagine for a second, a common brown garden snail, and now imagine one of those more than 20 centimetres long.

That’s what’s been found on the Gold Coast, not far from one of Queensland’s most popular nature parks, and the discovery of the world’s most destructive land snail has forced quarantine authorities to re-think their inspection procedures. The last Giant African Snail outbreak was at Gordonvale, near Cairns, in far north Queensland in 1977 – hundreds were found and they took eight months to eradicate.

Some people keep them for pets, ugh, like the office workers at
Grove books

When you need an Umbrella

Well I’m certainly pleased to have a frog in my garden, she may keep the blasted gastropods from returning. Drop in and say hello to my tenant ribbiticus, (in the rent-my-blog over to the right there) it’s her birthday. She didn’t come down in the last shower

Plenty of other frogs came down in the last shower - or the one before that.

Throughout history, there have been tales of raining frogs. These stories, as crazy as they may seem, are apparently real events.

In 1873, Scientific American reported that Kansas City, Missouri was blanketed with frogs that dropped from the sky during a storm.

Minneapolis, Minnesota was pelted with frogs and toads in July, 1901. A news item stated: “When the storm was at its highest… there appeared as if descending directly from the sky a huge green mass. Then followed a peculiar patter, unlike that of rain or hail. When the storm abated the people found, three inches deep and covering an area of more than four blocks, a collection of a most striking variety of frogs… so thick in some places [that] travel was impossible.”

The citizens of Naphlion, a city in southern Greece, were surprised one morning in May, 1981, when they awoke to find small green frogs falling from the sky. Weighing just a few ounces each, the frogs landed in trees and plopped into the streets. The Greek Meteorological Institute surmised they were picked up by a strong wind. It must have been a very strong wind. The species of frog was native to North Africa.

As long as the passing breeze doesn’t pick up any snails

Was God a Gardener?

I had a serious confrontation with a gang of gastropods this morning.

This is not the first time that we have run into problems. First off, I don’t like ‘em. I don’t like snails or any of their numerous cousins and assorted kinfolk. That said, I realise they have a right to exist in their own appalling little world as I have in my own, and I’m prepared to look the other way, merely wrinkling my nose with fastidiousness, when they ooze across my path.

But they can keep their ugly stomach-feet out of my herbs!

I’ve done my best. I have made a safe spot for them, a refuge, a haven hidden behind a particularly ugly clump of agapanthus, with a couple of old beer cans hidden under the leaves, some mossy overhung mini-boulders and a fat wad of newspaper. Gastropod heaven. If they would just stay there we could co-exist peacefully.

This morning I found a half dozen of the slimy things in the last of my tomatoes. Ingrates. Perhaps the heat of the last few days addled my brain, because I lashed out at the whole lot of them in fury. I shrieked at them. “I told you never to come in here. Don’t you know who I am? I am the Master Gardener, the Great Mother, I am She. I am God!”.

I picked them all up, threw them in a shoe box and carried them around to the back lane where I deposited them in the middle of the cobblestones. They are evicted. They are expelled. I wash my hands of them.

Sitting down with a soothing glass of sherry to calm myself, still shaking from the trauma, I started thinking.

Was God was a Gardener?