Nature Notes - Dogsitting

When I agreed to dog-sit my sister’s sprocker (springer/cocker cross) and springer, my first action was to scour the web for gundog training aids.  The dogs are, it’s fair to say, unrivalled as treat-seeking furry missiles but I wanted to see whaat they could do with something aa bit more interesting than a distressed tennis ball.

There are many gundog training aids, from realistic looking stuffed birds to the basic bean bags that I went for.  The bean bag is designed to let your dog learn how to carry a bird without ripping it to bloody feathery shreds and it’s fair to say that they were something of a hit.  Essentially they are nylon socks that are incredibly robust, with a lanyard at one end.  This allows the owner to pick up what very quickly becomes a muddy, drooly training aid, give it a couple of twirls and then slingshot it across the field with an over-excited dog in hot pursuit.  Repeat until your arm falls off.

The only moment when I questioned whether the bean bag was a good idea was when, after a particularly hearty throw, neither I nor the dogs could find the damn thing.  It was eventually discovered hanging from a tree branch.  Obviously, if it had had a treat sewn into the lining, the dogs would have been on it in an instant.

It’s not that they are greedy, although they can sometimes appear to emulate Greyfriar’s Bobby in their unswerving devotion to sitting beside the kitchen cupboard where their treats are kept (much in the same way that I will linger near a beer fridge), but they are proof positive that food can be used as a training aid.  In this case, they have both learned where the smacko’s are kept.

The golden rule of throwing the dummy was never to toss it anywhere where you couldn’t see it land.  The dogs are tenacious in their pursuit of the dummies and won’t let small things like ponds, or sudden drops , put them off.

There is an art to throwing the dummy, and an art to getting the damn thing off of the dogs once they have retrieved it.  This involves just the right amount of cajoling and shouting and, if all else fails, bribing them with a treat.

Now all I need to find is a fluorescent pheasant and the dogs will be ready for action.  With advances in GM food being made the way they are, I’m confident I won’t have long to wait.

Nature Notes - Catquisition

‘Catnapping’ is such an ugly, emotive word, don’t you think?  That’s why what happened over the bank holiday weekend can much better be described as ‘catquisition’. 

Simply put, we seem to have acquired a cat.  Over the past few weeks we had noticed that the neighbour’s cat was asleep on the roof of our shed, then on the garden furniture.  How it crept steadily closer to the house like some sort of amazingly lazy stop-motion amble I’m not sure, because prior to this weekend I had never seen the thing awake, never mind moving.  Then at the weekend I was walking through the kitchen, stepped over the sleeping cat, got myself a drink and walked out again, once more stepping over the cat.  The cat, it would appear, had decided that the back door being open was an invitation to spend some time out of the hot sun sprawled on a cool kitchen floor.

The morality of this is quite straightforward, it is obviously wrong to steal somebody else’s’ cat.  But is it wrong to, well, offer them a bowl of water on a hot day?  The golden rule was that we would never ever feed the cat.  That evening, we were explaining to our guests round a crowded dinner table over the traditional blackened meat barbeque feast why there was a cat perched next to one of their children, being stroked and purring like an exceptionally contented outdoor motor.  Wine flowed and conversation progressed, the cat, as cats do, wandered around a bit, circulating.  We were explaining the golden rule when one of the guests, who had been bending over in his chair, straightened up with something of a guilty expression, and half a sausage in his hand.

I freely admit that until this point, most of my knowledge of cats came from Tom & Jerry cartoons so, sure, keep them away from frying-pan wielding mice, bulldogs and sassy black maids with brooms, but now that the cat had tasted free range pork sausage, I thought I had better learn a bit more, starting with are cats allergic to free range pork sausage. In case you are wondering, they are not, although they do get very agitated if you try and take their free range pork sausage away from them, but then so do I.  

Nature Notes - Cull-ture club and coughing cows

Ruddy ducks, bloody deer and bastard badgers are just three species to have the misfortune to find themselves on the front pages of the newspapers next to the word ‘cull’.

It’s hard to think of another creature as inoffensive as a duck, unless you are a loaf of bread in which case you probable have a lot to fear.  Only my nephew can challenge a duck when it comes to a complete lack of guile.  This is a child that was once outwitted by a goat, a tale still referred to round the dinner table by the title ‘Billy and the trousers’.  Deer, it would seem are a victim of their own success, they breed in numbers and rub their antlers on trees.  Well, obviously, something has to be done about this rutting arboreal menace.

The problem for badgers is not that traditional shaving brushes have suddenly become very fashionable but rather that they give cattle bovine TB.  Whether they sneak up behind an unsuspecting cow in dead of night with a syringe full of the stuff, or whether they just cough on them has not been made clear.  What has been made clear is that cows make milk and therefore money while badgers make beloved characters in childrens’ literature but this is not enough to prevent them from the sort of persecution until recently reserved for kiddyfiddlers, 1970s teevee personalities or, worst of all, kiddyfiddling 1970s teevee personalities, the cull of which has also been front page news.

 If coughing cows is not reason enough to dislike them, Nazis obviously had badger sympathies, as is evidenced by their sharing of the same colour scheme.  All footage of Nazis shows them in black and white.

Culling is a traditional country pastime and one imagines that rather than Predator Drone strikes, traditional country cruelty will be employed.

Byways

I am composing this while standing up. Not, as you may reasonably assume, as a homage to Hemmingway (one must always be ready to pay homage to Hemmingway, but one must also be suspicious of anyone who is not a blood-relative and asks you to call you ‘Papa’. This is surely a step away from calling a family friend ’uncle’ and those inverted commas mean only one thing - ‘special cuddles’, years in therapy and never being able to properly enjoy Christmas again!), nor because it is the feast day of some Saint martyred by standing, nor even through misdirected patriotism (this manifests itself in beatings of ethnic minorities after dark).

No, I am composing this standing up because my arse feels like that of a buggered bum-boy after a Barrymore pool-party.

The reason? I was out on my bicycle this weekend. The weather was glorious and it seemed quite the thing to do to bike over to the park, point the trusty steed off the path and onto one of the trails through the trees and meadows and see where a sense of adventure, a lot of peddling in low gear and a great deal of sweat could take you.

It’s not that big a park, but by the simple method of criss-crossing it, it turned into quite a long ride - enough to justify a stop for refreshments at the tea shop and at least two occasions when I thought my front forks would end up pointing towards the heavens over my prostrate corpse. I think that the illusion of size is brought about in part by the screening off of the traffic noise and by the planting. At the moment everything is in leaf and so nature screens meadow from meadow. As for the meadows themselves - the grass is long (not as long as the grass used to conceal the ‘raptors in ‘Jurassic park III’, or I would have gone home for a cup of tea and a biccie until the trembling of fear passed), but long enough to contain fumbling couples, sullen teens sitting alone (that’s not just by themselves, which anyone can do, but ‘alone’, the exclusive preserve or the teen), as well as not-so-sullen teens, sitting with a book in the middle of a meadow and apparently enjoying the sunshine and solitude.

Tracks marked and unmarked, paved and unpaved, cross the park. Some of them are mere dirt tracks, other are lost byways - obviously roads at some point, paved in concrete but now - forgotten, overgrown, the branches of the bordering trees interlacing above them to form a tunnel of damp green gloom - an ideal spot to stop your bike and wait for your heart rate to return to normal.

And the arse? Well, despite the best efforts of a gel-filled saddle, I think I may have been somewhat too enthusiastic when riding. It’s great fun rushing down a trail at high speed, hammering over rough ground and tree-roots but, that evening, when I re-mounted to go and visit friends - it felt as if somebody had brought a cricket-bat to bear on my tender portions!

Obviously, if I am to enjoy the rough stuff this summer, I will need to toughen up, or learn to peddle side-saddle.