General Chat

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D
Of course!!

Caffeine is poisonous for both cats and dogs.
Did supercrutch not notice?

:-P :-P :-P :-P

...it's very difficult explaining humour and the use of emoji's to someone who's full of their own importance, but I've had a good laugh :-D :-D :-D

Mice and rats do live in close proximity.

I have not had one rodent in the house while I have not had a cat. My last one so loved me so much he would bring a live one in for me far more frequently than I could get rid of them so the rodent exterminator was called.

He explained to me that the reason my rat traps were not going off although the bait was taken was that it was being eaten by mice who were too light to trigger them.

the Russian for dog is sobarka which always struck me as funny
koshka is a cat
mouse is myshey
spider is pauk

the cats have a very hard time of it
the mice live in the luxury of the district heating schemes ; they have plenty to eat as Russians are worse litter louts than the Brits. The mice are bigger than English mice and more fluffy.
be wary of the dogs
the spiders are unremarkable tho a Russian warship class is called Spider

........ :-S

Sharron - that doesn't make me feel any better :-|

Having enjoyed the company of each, I would say that, o balance, I much prefer rats.

They are far more discrete, don't leave black hundreds and thousands everywhere and only exude a faint smell of wee.

Rats have a nasty habit of hanging around pub basements where crates of beer are stored.

They do leave a certain smelly trail as they scurry across the beer bottles. With this in mind, I sometimes wonder why some youngsters see it as 'cool' to drink beer directly from the bottle.

Makes me shiver! :-S

I suppose my daughters oversized 'fancy' rats were quite nice - they were male, dense, and peed everywhere!. :-| :-|

They weren't as nice as the (female) baby one eldest brought home, that she found on the underground!!
Daughter's age can be deduced by her name for the rat - Sensimilla.(Milly for short).
She was a little cutie. Not 'oversized' like the fancy rats - if anything smaller than the average wild rat, probably due to her bad start, intelligent, came when called - sat happily on daughter's shoulder- and didn't pee everywhere!

My previous 'close encounter' with a rat was when the children were quite small, and we were living in a prefab, with a glass 'lean to' and cat flap. This was where we fed the cats.
I became used to seeing the cats queuing up behind hedgehogs to get their dinner - but was quite shocked one day, to see the cats on a shelf - and a rat eating their dinner!
I went to chase it out - and it went for me, so, hoe in hand a battle was fought.
I won (just).
We then borrowed the neighbour's (smallholders) Jack Russell.

Cats are feral are not unwelcome in some places. There is a farm just south of Sunderland I once visited. It was heaving with a colony of cats.
I commented on them and was told they hep keep the rat population down.
So the rats are eating corn and the cats are eating rats....every body wins.

True! David :-D :-D :-D

Fawlty Towers had an amusing episode starring a 'dirty great rat'. :-D

Rats in huge quantities were responsible for the rapid spread of bubonic plague.


It took the great fire of London to contain it.

Years ago, we moved to an Australian country town which was gradually being urbanised - it's now almost subsumed as an outer-city suburb. At first we had one neighbour, after a while we got another as houses were erected. I used to hang out my washing in the garden at the side of the house before going to work.

One evening my two neighbours mentioned that there were an awful lot of snakes in their gardens that morning. (TIger snakes). In my blissful state, I forgot how short-sighted I was and thought that because we always kept the grass low, we had none in our garden.

It was the next morning, just as I was about to go into the garden, that it dawned on me that I ought to put on my glasses so I could see all of the garden 'cos it was a safe bet that they were sunning themselves in ours too. :-0

The largest one we saw in the open was a grey-coloured snake (a python, I think) about 15+ feet long in an old settlers' graveyard near Port McQ as it slid in front of us before disappearing down into the broken corner of someone's tombstone.

The way to catch smaller snakes is to put a tasty little something into a bottle. When the snake enters, it can't reverse - not that I've tried it, you understand. It's how the boys caught them years ago.

We have Tiger Snakes here as well, JoyLouise, but the main ones are Dugites.

Dugites are rather timid and will only (hopefully) attack when cornered, but Tiger snakes are more aggressive :-0

Tiger snakes are very aggressive, Allan. The kids were warned about them at school too. When our son was doing the cross-country for school, there were one or two.

Red backs were common where we were. I had to stop my daughter lifting plant pots and stamping on them when she was about two or three. They could give you a nasty bite but, surprisingly, they could also kill anyone very young or elderly with health problems.

Blue-ringed octopus was my greatest dread - never saw one though. :-0 :-0 :-0

Maggie, are we really supposed to believe that you had a spider that brought rats in to the house?

And David, your wife had a large ginger what? The mind boggles.