Cat 3

I've got a new cat. New as in new to my home; definitely not new to this world. Effie (not my choice of name) is a sixteen-year old tortie tabby white female suffering from hyperthyroidism, limited rear mobility, epilepsy and a kidney complaint. The three former of these ailments are all related. Hyperthyroidism is fairly common in older cats: over-production of thyroid in the glands or something, which can very quickly tip the balance between life and death. This is not the kind of health problem a wildcat needs to concern itself with. Hyperthyroidism in domestic felines is the residue of a life spent around humans and their processed foods. In effect, our ministrations act to make the feline into a growbag for otherwise unseen physiological nasties. We see it in ourselves - decrepid and wrinkled shadows of people, housebound and harbouring a bevy of complaints because society can't quite pluck up the balls to let them die. And in turn we unleash it upon our pets, creating creatures that Mother Nature could only dream of.
There are a few remedies to death from hyperthyroidism in felines (none of them very nice); for Effie, the vet opted for a thyroid operation. The surgery entails a three-inch long incision down the front of the throat, a bit of jiggery-pokery inside and three neat stitches. After the operation most felines develop an insatiable hunger (they literally eat everything like it's their last meal), a grimy unkempt coat, persistent pissing and hard nugget-like stools (that's shit to you and me). Strangely, Effie developed none of these post-surgical symptoms. Instead, Effie lost most of the mobility in her tail and hindquarters. Now she pads carefully along like a geriatric dinosaur, her stiff horizontal tail swinging awkwardly behind a prominent hunch on her lower back. Any need to turn more than 45 degrees causes her to stumble and right herself with what I can only describe as a degree of embarrassment. You see, if nothing else, a cat is marked by its agility. There's no need to pack-hunt, no cause to burrow or grub or forage or delude. To little critters a cat is an arrow of death: silent, deliberate, exacting.
Unless you take a cat like Effie. Or what there is left of a cat like Effie. Don't get me wrong, she's one of the best looking senior felines I've ever seen, and highly sociable (if in a gimlet-eyed, doddering way). But all appreciation of her is tempered by a vein of pity. What we are seeing in Effie is what's left when you remove the archetypes of the cat, the 'felinity' shall we say. What we see is a zombie.
The epilepsy was another byproduct of the surgery. It began soon after the operation, while she was still in her pen at the sanctuary: a little too loud or sharp a sound, the flash of a brightly coloured t-shirt, and she was away. You could have thrown her into a vat of lumpy gravy and it'd come out smooth. The bouts would last about thirty seconds, after which she would rise to the surface of whatever dark sea she'd inadvertently plunged into, sweaty and hyperventilating. I've seen only two of these fits, and they both scared the shit out of me. I'd hate to see a human epileptic fit.
I'm pleased to say that the fits have subsided since she moved into my spare room. She only ever had the one flip-out since she joined the family, and that (aptly enough) was sitting there watching me play the Nintendo.
As for the kidney complaint, who can say. Healthy cats need only consume a miniscule amount of water per day - they have supernatural homeostasis compared to us naked apes. Except Effie of course. She probably gets through a quarter pint of water a day, with a cheeky lap of tea out of my mug if she catches me with my back turned. For the kidneys she's administered a single Fortekor tablet. I throw them down her every evening, and she's become an adept at subordination. Most cats will try some kind of squirming when you try to get a pill down them, but Effie's a positive statue - patient and accommodating.
And that's the crux. Where once there was a cat, there's now something else in the place of Effie, a creature that no zoologist could reclassify and yet wholely different. But there's no vacancy in the place of where her natural abilities once were. She is no less complex. Pill-swallowing? Tea drinking? Awkward? Top-heavy? What we see in place of her felinity my friends, is humanity.

Year Two: Single-cellular students

Well, for those few of you that read this blog (many thanks Andy and Pete) it will not have slipped your notice that I haven't written into it for bleeding months. This is because my only easy access to the internet is at college, and college has been closed for the summer. Now it's open again, and I'm back to take, like an inefficient assassin, a stab at passing my second year of my animal care course.
Year one went well. Scored a distinction over all. But woah there, save the congratulations - my course is piss easy. And, I suspect, essay marking is relative to the efforts of my fellow students i.e. if the rest of the divs in my class perform less ably than myself, then I look like a genius and attain sterling marks. This has been about the size of it so far, which, on the surface of it, would sound like a bit of a let down. I mean, surely I should strive to succeed through my own merit, elbowing my way through the throngs of able-minded academics to the gates of the perfect job. How else can my drive to achieve be sated?
Heh heh... the reverse is true. I'm actually really pleased that the vast majority of my class is made up of fat lazy teenage wasters who have only got into animal care because animals are the only entities on the planet that don't find them smelly and boring, and you don't have to have a brain to shovel shit for the rest of your life. On this note let me, for posterity's sake, wish them all the very fucking worse for the next twelve months. May their minds go blank and their bics run dry just when the lecturer is about to enlighten us with the most important piece of zoological info since Darwin blew chunks over the side of the Beagle and hit upon the notion of survival of the fittest.

Fox

The fox ate my chickens. I'm absolutely gutted. This all happened back at the beginning of the summer when, no doubt, the fucker's cubs need extra nosh to sustain themselves. In animal nutrition, critters (and indeed humans) daily consumptive needs are termed as 'maintenance requirements'. Maintenance is what a single creature needs to thrive and maintain the energy to survive for that day. Females that are either pregnant or are lactating generally require more than maintenance needs to thrive, as they have to feed one to many other little entities at the same time. This increased need necessitates an additional burst of ingenuity driven by desperation. In the case of the fox that ate my chickens, this would have involved overcoming her fear of human smell.
Fox loathe humans. Our smell is a vast billboard of warnings to the fox nose. My chickens were doused in human smell. Aside from the foot and handprints around the run, I'd also hung up little nylon bags of my own hair around the coop. Of all our body parts, human hair gives off the strongest smell, and locks this smell in for longer through oils. This said, the cunt still took my chucks, leaving a scattering of forlorn breasty down on the ground for me to weep over.
It was the scene I dreaded seeing every morning throughout the year that I had my chucks: a half-dozing stumble up the garden path with a bag of scraps, a nonchalant lift of the tarpaulin, and the frozen stare of disbelief as I find in the place of my weaving, happy-to-see-you fowl the signs of a struggle and a pile of chest feathers...
I was less upset than I thought I would be, oddly. They are, though fascinating and enchanting to keep and watch, only bloody chickens, and this rationale held strong as I let slip the bag of scraps into the dirt and stalked angrily from the garden to work. To have been inconsolable would have been more of an insult to their memories, I feel, than to simply shrug and immediately consider my options for getting some more fowl. I mean, I take great pleasure in chowing down on a nice bit of free-range fillet breast from the shops, what right have I to shake my fist at the foxy devil that brought an abrupt end to my hobby? She too must live, and thrive. To have overcome her irrational fears of me and break through my defences showed great courage, the same bravado that dragged both her ancestors and ours up the minepit of preconsciousness into modern times. Throughout those dark primeval years both she and I have taken great risks to tuck into goggy-eyed poultry, to ensure, if only for one more day, the comfort of time and succour within the family unit.
And so, as opposed to poor old Barbara and Margot, this entry is dedicated to the wiley bitch that brought my egg production to a halt; may she go from strength to strength, and see the wisdom in steering well clear of me.

Dog 2

Tonight I chased a dog. It wasn’t my dog, it was a stranger’s dog. She’d tied her, a young but almost fully grown Rottweiler, to one of those newspaper clapperboards that stand outside paper shops, and gone in. Pat and I passed by after getting an Indian takeaway, and suddenly the dog goes mad, running out into the middle of the street and dragging the clapperboard behind it, the weighted rubber base bouncing over the ground and spinning around her neck like one of those tennis ball on a rope games we played as kids. I ran out into the road after her, takeaway clutched in one hand, trying to grab the board to stop her going mental. She wasn’t barking or anything; there was no foam flying from her black lips or glaring red eyes. She just appeared to be positively jubilant, finding herself miraculously tied to something that couldn’t hold her still.

Anyway, she eluded my clutches and legged it onto the other side of the road and into the police station car park. I gave chase. She bolted straight towards one of those motorised gate things (you know the ones, a thick red and white striped bar with thinner pieces of latticed metal hanging down) with a touch-pad code box on a pole to one side. Fucking dog ran through that. After that I gave up my quarry, dumped my takeaway and decided to walk after her.

Behind the station, in the middle of another police car park, she danced and eddied around, spinning the clapperboard around her like a flag in a gale. Two coppers come running out of the back of the station. The youngest goes to grab her, and then thinks better of it. They watch (with amusement I feel) as I stamp on the clapperboard and bring the dog to a halt. The owner is close behind. Strangest thing is, when we’d got hold of the dog she wasn’t even angry. I immediately put my hand on her head and she was fine. Bitch was almost smiling. The copper told the owner to untie her from the board. She duly did so – and then immediately let the dog go again. The dog ran off at a scamper, the owner following.
I shared a giggle with the rozzers. “I’ll take this back to the shop then,” I said, picking up the clapperboard. I heaved it on to my shoulder… to me it weighed a ton of bricks. When I got out into the street people were just standing around laughing their heads off (Pat included). As I crossed the road a man leaned out of his car window with tears in his eyes. “If you’d have seen that from here,” he smirked; “it was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.” He wiped his eyes. “But where’s the dog?” I shrugged. “Don’t know mate, it’s not mine.” This seemed like the cherry on the cake to him and he collapsed into more laughter. Strange… it didn’t seem that funny to me at the time- but lying in bed that night, long after the people in the street and the coppers and Pat had no doubt forgotten the whole escapade, I shook with silent hilarity.

Cats 2

Well, it only took three weeks working with cats for me to actually own a cat. I’ve had cats before, but it’s been about six years ago or so. The first barrier to cross when owning a cat, and I forgot all about this, is naming the bloody thing. I mean, he came with a name: Heathcliffe. Now, I know that the woman who named him was thinking of Wuthering Heights, but as we’re of different generations I can’t help thinking about that piss-poor cartoon ginger cat during the eighties, and as my cat’s a black cat, more graceful than fat and annoying (and not capable of leaving a cloud of dust behind when he runs), it just didn’t seem right. So by the time I’d got home with him he had a new name: Valentine. This was what I was going to call him, full stop. Until I suggested it to Pat, then Valentine became questionable. So I came up with another: Battlecat. As in Battlecat from He-Man, which Pat is too polite to inform me is actually a purple and green cat from a piss poor eighties cartoon. Battlecat went out the window within a day. We mooted the idea of being direct and just calling him Cat, like Holly Golightly’s cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; but we kind of call him Cat anyway, the way I call my friends Man, so the title doesn’t fill the vacant space reserved for our need to anthromorphise this tiny nonchalant panther sitting on our rug.
Deprived, not of any good names, but the confidence to think that any name I might choose would be cool, we agreed to call him Paul.

Paul mostly sleeps. When he does wake up he tends to sit idly watching you in whatever you’re doing, or crying for food. Don’t get me wrong, in cat society this guy would be considered a gentleman; he doesn’t scratch the furniture and he doesn’t jump up on cupboards and send pots and pans rattling in the night. He’s a very ground-level chunky cat, solid muscle. The feline equivalent of that big Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But as much as I may label him with human traits and allegories there’s less understanding I think between people and cats than with say a dog or a horse. Some empathic communication can go on between humans and cats – I believe that a slow flick of the head is a form of greeting, that making eye contact with the cat and slowly blinking is a way of saying ‘I like you, I’m relaxed’ (these things seem to work for me) – but I don’t think that the cat has any real concept of what I’m doing unless it’s something obvious like opening a door or a can of food for him. I considered also that, to me, the cat has no idea that I’m intelligent, because my actions bare no real relation to the world in which he inhabits. To him he is intelligent, for he has no need to understand this slow-moving, hulking creature that looms over him, letting out sonorous and meaningless sounds from its mouth, only a few utterances of which carry any message. A certain whistle or inflection in the voice when calling its name may tell a cat that it’s dinner time; but what else could such an independent entity need from the mixed up, over-analysing fuck heads that we human beings are? What does a cat need with TVs or PCs or DVDs or worrying about STDs or the BNP?

Cats are entirely aesthetic. We don’t eat them (well, the Chinese eat them, but you know what I mean) they don’t perform manual tasks, they don’t create produce. They consume; and as such are perhaps the perfect pet for this day and age. They are the mascot of every marketing executive in the western world. Not only will Paul cost me around a fiver a week feeding him (in theory – of course it’s cheaper for me because I’m surrounded by cat food all day at work and it’s a natural law of physics that cans of cat food invariably fall over and roll down wonky work surfaces straight in to my bag at least once a day) but the food I feed him if I opt for the consumer brands will offer far less than he requires nutritionally, will develop in him an addiction to sugars and an ever escalating pickiness to refuse all food except the most expensive. Faced in my future with giving a proverbial blow job to the massive pet food organisations, I realise I’m in the rare position of being able to choose an alternative for my cat. I’ve studied animal nutrition, I’m resourceful, my hat sits at a jaunty angle, why not develop an alternative diet for Paul which involves the use of prime raw meat as nature intended him to eat, coupled with fresh vegetables as organic as Pat and I choose to eat? Why not wish the best for my pet, and drive a wedge between myself and the capitalists? A cat was meant to lick bloodied meat from the bone, not suck up a jellified mass of bread/meat/veg flavoured by some labcoat-wearing spotty prick in Scunthorpe getting paid basic minimum wage?

Why not? Because I’m a lazy fuck, and the big pet food companies know it. Maybe my cat was meant to lick meat off the bone, but I was meant to knock around playing the guitar and writing up tripe like this, not pandering to a creature that sleeps fifteen hours a day, can’t open the fridge himself and doesn’t even know my fucking name. Come to think of it, that wily look in the eye when I first adopted him was probably his way of giving me a new name. Stephen? What sort of wanky name is Stephen? You look like a Gavin to me. No, no, a Craig. Ooh ooh, how about Barry… how about He-Man?!
How about fuck off Paul.

Deer

I was at college last Tuesday. We went to a deer park. Before we arrived a deer stalker called Stephen, forty maybe, in a green jumper with a hard, weather-beaten face, told us a little about deer management and stalking. As he talked he handed out a quarterly magazine called ‘Deer’, what he referred to as a veritable encyclopaedia for deer stalkers if collected and kept together. He explained the reality behind deer hunting – hunter and woodsman were portrayed as the heroes of children’s stories pre-1945; but after Bambi, deers were anthromorphised and the hunter became the Bad Guy. A final scene in the film is where the young buck grown up sits and watches the sunset with his father. In reality, Stephen explained, a father’s worst enemy is his sons; his sons’ are him. He expanded by telling us about mature bucks, alpha males that continue to fight off and defeat younger males and monopolise the females, that after about four or five years he is shot; because otherwise when he does finally lose a fight (which he inevitably will – dominance is always fleeting, and strength wanes for us all) the other males, many his sons, alienate him completely from the herd because of his greed and audacity. They will not let him fuck, they will not even let him eat. They attack him if he comes near, and for herding animals the herd is life; alone they’re dead meat to the elements. The young males fight him to incapacity. He eventually collapses and rots. Maggots fester in old wounds, gangrene sets in. So when Stephen sees an old alpha male lose his first fight he puts a bullet through his head immediately.
The carcass is tended to straight away, while the rest of the herd scatter from the crack of the rifle. The stomachs of the deer (deer have two, and so are modified ruminants) are cut out there and then – the other organs are keep inside for the butcher. The meat from a single deer can bring in £500. If the animal is shot by an amateur stalker, some touring hunter from Germany perhaps, only out for the head and antlers to mount on his living room wall, there’s another five-hundred nicker on top for the privilege of shooting it.
As Stephen talked I flicked through the magazines he’d handed out. Interspersed within the articles about the keys to good hunting and proficient stalking skills were page after page of adverts for rifles and superior bullets. .250 or .253 were Stephen’s recommendations. On the surface my first reaction was: ‘should I agree with all this gun play?’ Isn’t it unseemly, filling our minds with the snap of the rifle shot and innocent eyes rolling up in their heads as blood gouges from gaping wounds? But then he told us that there were more deer in Britain at the moment than in the 1066 census. It immediately brought to mind the thought of mediaeval men, many surviving on wild game, while whole deer were roasted in the feasting halls of lords and barons. And suddenly it didn’t seem so controversial. The thought of some cowled villein stalking a white stag with a bow and arrows doesn’t fill me with regret for the deer’s life. It’s the romance that moves me to be more pragmatic. Could there not also be romance is killing an animal with a high-powered weapon far more likely to make the death immediate and relatively painless?
Deer, even when completely wild in the rugged unknown are owned by somebody, and as such gives the landowner the right to cull and harvest from the herds as he sees fit. Over the years deer management has grown more efficient and successful in breeding and care, backed up by the knowledge of the ages and technological advances… so that now Red deer, Fallow deer, Roe deer, Muntjac, Sika deer and Chinese Water deer thrive in great numbers across Britain, drifting over the fields and forests free from the larger predators we men made extinct; the deer stalker picking off the surplus and those that would suffer the mercilessness of a natural death.
When we arrived at the deer park we found that it was labelled as ‘hall and gardens.’ There was a teashop and public toilets and beautiful stilled pools shadowed by weeping willows. Round the bend of the gravel path, hidden by great old pines swaying in the breeze, we came across an imposing mansion house with great sandstone pillars holding up a mighty tymphanum, on which a bas-relief of a coat of arms and mounted deer’s head stood proudly telling us we were on a wealthy family’s land.
Beyond the house a glorious rolling scape galloped away in deep greens and browns, the as yet leafless giants of ancient oak and Scots pine ranged across. This was land tended by a thousand years and more of ownership – silent, watchful, open to a great sky that seemed always owned for hiding itself to all but those that took the gravel path. But, noted Stephen, as though sensing our thoughts of class boundaries, the old Saxon family that owned this place didn’t have ‘a fiver to buy a burger’. Everything was assets, collected and invested and fought to keep by generation after generation of the same blood. It brought to mind the old bucks that he shot; as yet this wealthy family had not been shot for monopolising so much, but would that change, if only metaphorically, when they finally lost their fight?
We took a well-worn track up towards the ridge of a bluff. The house now was in the distance. Half way up, a great herd of Red stags and does appeared ahead, marching towards us purposefully. They had heard and smelt us from far and banded together in to one group for safety. They were certainly imposing in their number. The college group stood stock still and a moment of fear and exhilaration passed amongst the humans. The deer finally halted about fifty yards away and watched us, identical all save for where the thin hands of antlers sprouted up amongst their number. Then one moved at the back, decided they’d watched us enough, and one by one like a ripple moving through them they surged away silently.
Stephen moved ahead and one by one we followed. After a short walk we halted at the crest of the bluff and looked down on a picturesque landscape. There were four herds here: Red male and female and Fallow male and female; but we could only see two because the Fallow too had banded together as a precaution against us. They roved in a distant field.
After a short walk we halted and broke into small talking groups. There seemed no order to our movement as a herd now. Stephen had told us everything. We simply mulled, all looking in the same direction as somebody pointed out another herd in the distance or a fox or a flock of crows.
In time one small group of humans, unspoken, decided to head back to the mansion, and we all followed unconsciously, talking as we went. The first herd of deer we had seen rushed like the shadow of a cloud a hundred yards ahead (they’d run a huge half-circle around us in the time it had taken us to walk ten yards) and we watched their progress as they finally left us and disappeared into a nearby wood.
I couldn’t suppress a smile. Though cold on the outside from a brisk Spring wind, I was warmed by the beauty of what I was seeing and simplicity of such a natural arrangement, as I dutifully followed my own herd back to the coach.

Cats

This will no doubt be one of several entries regarding cats, for I have a new job at a cat sanctuary. We’ve got about a hundred or so felines there, from poor wretches which some knob has decided they don’t want anymore (such as pregnant queans, and those felines who have suddenly decided to make their owners allergic to them) to unfortunate feral cats spotted on the land of unsympathetic farmers and strayed into our iron cage traps to become part of the dusty furniture at the bottom of the sanctuary’s garden. Compared to those cats considered domestic though these ferals have it fairly easy. Domestic cats are housed in a concrete box about the size of a lavish telly, with a glass door at the front and a glass window at the back complete with cat flap for them to take the air, if they so wish, in their very own en suite meagre run behind.
Between each run, which filter down like Auschwitz maisonettes in rows of twenty or more, are what is termed in the cattery business as ‘sneeze boards’ (which I found mildly amusing as it rhymed with cheese boards) – these are simply perspex sheets put up between each run to prevent the critters from sneezing on each other and, like some giant virulent domino rally, beginning a chain reaction hat infects all the cats down the line of runs with nasty colds or worse. Trouble is, the sneeze boards are only four foot high, while the runs’ caged walls are a good eight feet or more, so it would be easy enough for any sadistic cat to simply climb the wall and sneeze over the boards onto his unwitting neighbour.
There are many other dynamically ludicrous elements to running a cat sanctuary. Just as mediaeval doctors believed that wearing beak-like masks full of herbs reduced the risk of contracting the plague (hence the soubriquet ‘quacks’) so too do cattery owners believe that wearing disposable polythene aprons prevents the spread of feline enteritis and wearing shoe sleeves (much like nylon gloves but shaped like slippers) over their grubby trainers will abate the monstrous claws of feline immunodeficiency virus (the cats’ very own brand of Aids).
Of course, no one considers the fact that we’re feeding all the cats on Felix, one of many inferior bread-like mush compounds coated in semi-transparent brown jelly that offers less than 20% of a cat’s daily protein requirements. If, as they say, an apple a day keeps the doctor away from us, so too I believe would a hearty and nutritionally adequate dose of real meat keep the vet away from the pussies. Sadly, it appears that a prerequisite for working for a feline welfare society is to don a pair of blinkers at the door and walk around with the conviction that gallons of bleach and a universal dose of anthropomorphisation is what’s needed to keep their inmates fit and healthy.

Cat society is matriarchal. As with many species in the animal kingdom, males and females segregate themselves from each other entirely save during copulation. The males scratch out a lonely life at the hinterland of the social group, while the females band together under a dominant quean. This matriarch is aggressive, monopolising and merciless to both her own personal WI, and to those males that seek a bit of nooky from the fringe. No female can touch food until the matriarch has had her fill. I believe the matriarch also gets the pick of the males.
Similarities between this last paragraph and human cat sanctuary society is fascinating. My workplace is run by a woman (as are most cat sanctuaries – cats are the woman’s dog after all) and ninety percent of the workforce there are women. My boss governs with an iron fist, while the rest of the females whine and bitch about her and anyone else not within earshot as though their lives depended on it. Donations are often made – bags of car boot-style junk are left on our doorstep for us to flog in one of our many charity shops. My boss gets first dibs on everything. Any man that walks into reception is allowed only peremptory conversation with whatever girl is behind the desk before my boss rushes out of her office and intercedes, drawing his attention away with her high-pitched schmoozing and steely glares at the receptionist which seem to say ‘back the fuck off or I’ll shred your ears’. By contrast we few males that work there spend our days just getting on with the work, in many ways ostracised from the clique (thank fuck), flicking dry smiles and winks of camaraderie at each other because we all know the score. We work with cats, the signs are there, that’s all that’s needed. At lunchtimes the women band together and talk; the males drift off to their own quiet corners and have a blissful hour of solitude. The single question that pops into my mind at this point is this: ‘is this a natural similarity, or do cattery staff become more like cats over time?’ I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Pigeons

I'm doing a data gathering dissertation at college. The theme was entirely open-ended, as long as it was animal-themed. So I began to wrack my brains. In time I came up with the idea of an experiment entitled 'Proliferation, Activity and Preference of Feral Pigeons in an Urban Park'. The experiment pretty much entailed throwing down three different food options of the same weight on to a park path and measuring how many pigeons came, how fast they ate and which food they preferred. As an afterthought I decided to measure air temperature and the amount of light during the experiment to see if it affected the birds. Convinced that this was an entirely original idea I went on the internet to see if I could find some nice photos of pigeons, perhaps find a little literature on this ill-considered member of the animal kingdom.

I was astounded to find that every manjack out there had already come up with the same bleeding idea. There's literally reams of stuff out about pigeons. Here's what I found out:

• Pigeons exist in almost every city across the world, despite being indigenous to only a small part of it.
• Their official name is rock dove; there's very little difference between the scabby club-footed thing that turns figure of eights under your feet while you're scoffing a sanga at lunchtime and the idealised white flutterer that brought an olive leaf back to Noah. If that's not the perfect euphemism for modern human society I don't know what is.
• Pigeons are one of the few birds that suck water in when they drink. You see, most birds take a beakful of water, then tip their heads up and swallow. But pigeons, those wiley devils, can literally stick their beaks into a puddle or a clogged guttering full of rain and suck up through them like a straw.

One piece of literature I found on the net was particularly interesting. It was written by a couple of biology students from Glasgow, and was based around trying to prove that pigeons are influenced by something called Ideal-Free Distribution (IDF). IDF states that accurate statistical predictions can be made on the habits of animals because they: A) All have equal competition for food and breeding and B) All have absolute knowledge of their surroundings. There's a lot more to it than that, but I can't remember it all now. It got me to thinking, could I possibly predict my own future through IDF? It would immediately be assumed that we homonids are not influenced by IDF - there's no equal competition for us, nor do we all have the same knowledge of our surroundings. Surely the son of a duke would have more opportunity in life than, say, a chav from the local estate. But we have to remember that competition and knowledge is environment-specific. It would seem easy to apply IDF to pigeons because they all look and act the same - their needs don't go much beyond a shit-riddled windowsill and a cold chip to peck at. But that's because man's arrogance disallows empathy with simpler creatures. To a fifty-foot high alien with dazzling superior intellect perhaps the constant gnawing of every human being on the surface of the earth would look very similar to a flock of ragged birds around a pile of mixed corn. Perhaps. Opportunity not only knocks, it's entirely relative as well. I'd like to see the son of a duke thrive in a pair of tracksuit bottoms and a burberry cap on the corner of a delapidated shopping centre.

We can take it as red then that we all fly in a flock of competitively similar people. It's this social group that moulded us, and which now keeps us safe, gives us meaning and a feeling of importance. We fear to leave our flock, for without them we lack relevance, we'd have to claw our way up the shaley escarpment of communities until we again find a place in the world. If any of this flippant gerrymandering I'm coughing up is actually accurate, then if I analyse where I think my friends and family are going I will go in a similar direction. And as flocks go I consider myself one lucky motherfucking bird. Everyone I hold dear has something good to say; every friend I have does me one good turn after another, and I try to do the same; they are all heading up, bound for greatness. In such admirable company I am assured of my fair share of the breadcrumbs... and will always be grateful, not only for this fortunate turn of the cards that placed me where I am, but also in the knowledge that no matter what our personal circumstances, we are all doves.

Dog

A short one this, because I haven’t had that much experience with dogs over the years. I thought I’d just tell you about the Staffordshire bull terriers that I grew up with. There were two over my informative years – Podge, my Nan and Grandad’s brown monster, and Sherry his daughter, who my aunty had. Podge was the smartest dog in the neighbourhood (but then, isn’t everyone’s). I remember tales of my Grandad putting a shilling in Podge’s mouth and letting him go down to the paper shop to bring back the daily. I don’t believe there’s much truth in that old chestnut. But the other funny story about old Podge is true: back in the seventies people used to get free packets of Smash through the post. That’s powdered mashed potato you’d rehydrate – Brits will no doubt remember those robots with two woks stuck together for heads on the TV, trying to sell us packets of some poor fuck’s psoriasis fallout under the guise of mashed spuds. Anyway, Podge had a penchant for the postman’s fingers, and would sit waiting just inside the front door with his mouth partly open. The moment one of those Smash packets dropped through the letterbox he’d have it in his maw, growling and chomping, mixing his ample saliva with whatever he could rend from the packet’s interior. Meanwhile, we’d all be sitting watching telly in the living room... and suddenly in would come this dog with a mashed potato beard.
Sherry was a little less comical. She was a great fat piebald barrel on four stick legs that loved shagging. Can’t remember much else about her, but she was a fine dog. From those childhood days to these I held Staffs in high respect. They were the princes of canines to me. Then, one day while I was working, I heard two animal keepers talking. One was looking for a dog for his yard. The other one asked him if he wanted a Staff. They both started laughing at some in-joke, and he said: “Not if you fucking paid me mate.” I don’t know - maybe they had something against mashed potato beards.

Chickens

I have two chickens called Barbara and Margot. I wasn’t going to name them because I thought it would make it too difficult to eat them when they stopped laying me eggs. But my girlfriend talked me into naming them, so I thought I’d choose names that instilled within them the spirit of self-sufficiency (ideally they should have been Barbara and Tom, as Margot Ledbetter was in no way self-sufficient; but if you want eggs you’ve gotta have girls, so Barb and Marg it is). If it’s any consolation to the raving carnies out there I often forget which is which and erroneously apply one’s name to the other.

This is generally the nature of all things chicken. As big and beautiful as they are, as ever surprising in their quirky little eccentricities, they are essentially incredibly stupid creatures with a total lack of autonomy. You could call every chicken Geoff and they wouldn’t care. Their days are made up with adhering to one simple thought process after another: I think I might peck the ground now… I think I might peck the ground a bit more now… okay, one more peck… I think I’ll sit on this bit of branch… I think I’ll preen under my wings now… ooh, a bit more pecking maybe… etc. etc., for the next five years until they die peacefully (if they’re lucky). My chickens live in a 6 x 6 x 4 ft. galvanised steel run I built from the carcass of a much larger zoo cage. I line the ground with piles of leaves and sticks to try to synthesise their natural habitat, which is not actually a rolling farmland meadow, but the shady floor of a dense jungle. Their coop was once a rather stately chest of drawers I found in the street. I was tempted to incorporate one of the drawers into the design, so that I could open a drawer and chucks would come fluttering out like animated underwear. But I’m not clever enough for that.

My chuckies lay about an egg a day each. They’re ISA Brown hens, the bog standard brown hen that’s successfully infiltrated just about every corner of the world. Genetically bred over the past forty years, these general labourers of the poultry world can convert just about anything into big juicy eggs just for me. If you think that what you’re getting inside a box of Sainsbury’s organic eggs at £1.50 a pop is the finest egg out there, then think again. When I first got my fowl we compared their very first egg with the most expensive organic egg we could find in the shops. They were pretty much the same size, but there the similarities ended. While the shell of Barb/Marg’s egg was thick, 3D-edged when broken like a china cup, and opaque against the light, Sainsbury’s eggshell was like brown paper dipped in oil; Barb/Marg’s yolk was large and burning orange like a midsummer sun; Sainsbury’s was like the reflection of the sun on a bucket of sour milk. The distinctions between them are unavoidable. Even the taste (no mere psychosomatry) is far superior in a home-laid egg. But now I’m getting on my high chicken (man I loving venting spleen against inferior eggs!).

They pretty much eat what I eat, only raw and in smaller quantities without a plate or cutlery. They really dig kale and comfrey (although comfrey ain’t too good for their livers so I keep it sparse), and would happily suck your cock for an hour if you offered them a fat juicy worm… please note, I don’t do this. Honest. They eat around 120 grams of anything a day, and then their crops are full. Chickens don’t have much in the way of taste buds (except right at the back of the throat, and by then it’s too late) and rely mostly on reflectivity, so they’ll eat practically anything. This means a domestic chicken’s diet has to be fairly well balanced to ensure that they receive an adequate level of proteins, fibre and vitamins and minerals. That said, I just chuck any old shit at them and still get lovely eggs.

But a note now, I feel, on Avian Flu. First of all, this ogre is in most part an invention of the media. Avian flu’s are all over the place, as prolific as human colds and just as diverse. There’s no getting around them – they’re as arbitrary as the birds themselves. I have little doubt that at some point it will reach the shores of Old Blighty, and then all mayhem will ensue in every town and city as every fuckwitted townie who wouldn’t know a chicken from a sodding pterodactyl will be running around buying face masks and scrubbing down their children with borax. Those that have fowl will simply lock them up or kill and eat them until it’s all over. I’d like to say that a terrible pandemic like the hand of god will sweep us all off the map, but I think that’s wishful thinking.

Fancy Rats

I used to keep two fancy rats. I was also once married. These two facts are connected. Shall I embellish? Oh you're so kind.
Okay, so I used to have two cats, then I met a woman who wanted me to move to London and marry her. So I did (not one to complain), but of course it's illegal to keep cats in London so I had to give them up to a nice old lady who lived in the country (that's not a euphemism, I really did). Pissed off that I was now living in a crummy back room of some London wanker's miserable house (because that was all we could afford), and that I no longer had any animals around me, I demanded that my new wife get me some form of fauna that was a little more tenable than felines.

So she bought me two fancy rats in a big cage. One was grey and white with bulging eyes, the other was ginger and white and was completely blind. This is not uncommon with creatures genetically engineered so ingeniously. The same happens with everything (and is happening to us too, no doubt). At first the novelty kept me rosy: I’d take them out and let them run all over me, chuckle at their utter lacking of understanding. People say that rats are clever – problem-solving intelligence they say. Yeah? Then consider this scenario: you get pick up by a giant who is two thousand times your size. Do you: A) Sit on your arse sniffing the air, then decide to lick your feet; B) Keep running in the same direction for twenty minutes, even though you suspect that the ground you’re running over is only the giant’s hands turned one over the other, while the giant laughs; C) Sing and dance for the giant until he falls alseep, then dive and grab a crease of his shirt, slide down his belly and duck under his arm, dashing for the nearest cover before he has a chance to gather his clumsy giantesque thoughts? I rest my case.

Needless to say, after a few months the rats began to piss me off. They and marriage were not a fair transaction for two beautiful loving cats. There just didn’t appear to be any affection there (this is the rats I mean… at least I think I mean). They just carried on staring at me with their big eight ball eyes, gnawing stereotypically at the bars. The cage began to stink to high heaven no matter how much I cleaned it.
Luckily at this time we moved out of London and came back to sunny Brum. During the summer I’d unclip the cage from the base and put in on the lawn, then put the two rats inside so they could have a nibble on the grass and sit in the sun if they wanted. As the summer months progressed the cage began to be left for longer and longer out there; one night I left them out all night, suspecting to come back and find a fat cat inside the cage licking his lips. But they were fine. Then, one night, while off my face on weed I just opened the cage door and left them to it.
In the morning they were gone. I got rid of the cage and forgot all about them. Soon after (as though these two aspects of my life were metaphysically linked) my wife disappeared too. I sat on my old chair under the veranda out back and drank a beer, pondering on the strange adventures that these three may be having at that very moment. I highly suspected that, apart from my ex-wife, they would be eaten. And yet, six months later, in the middle of winter, I happened to come home after work one day and find the blind rat sitting on my doorstep staring at me. It was the strangest thing. How had he survived long into the winter without vision? He’d gathered about him a thick mangy coat of ginger, and yet the white of his fur appeared to have almost completely vanished. In place of that gawking, special-child type look that he’d always given me through the bars of his cage, there was a steely, determined glare. He lifted himself up as high as his little hind legs would allow, tipped his nose derogatively, and disappeared into the night. Whatever problems he had faced over the last six months, he had solved.

Hamster

My hamster is a mad man. He’s six months old, grey-backed and snow-bellied. Russian… and it shows. He spends hours every night clinging to the chicken wire lid of his tank, swinging adeptly hand-over-hand from one pentangle of wire to the next. Hamster books will tell you that hamsters have no sense of orientation – they can’t judge distances and fall easily from any old precipice that leers up on their horizon. Not my Craig. He can leap six inches up from the shredded paper knoll of his home and grab the bars above. This is the equivalent of you jumping eighteen feet into the air. Every fall he makes only seems to stir him on further. I have to ask myself at times: Is he trying to escape? Does he believe that if he continues this repetitive clambering behaviour enough he will one day find a gaping hole in the chicken wire and in a precarious instant find himself on an unfamiliar path beneath mountainous furniture, to live out his days in a dark hole behind the skirting board or under the floor, encountering house mice, sniffing over the dusty ground in the darkness for any morsel of food. That, I suspect, would be my hamster’s idea of heaven. Absolute ignorance… the only truth the next object to fall under his twitching whiskers.
I wonder if he’d win in a fight against a house mouse. He seems, despite his athletic demeanour, a bit defenceless, a sitting duck as such. His claws are tiny; practically blunt filaments of nothingness. His bite fails to break the skin of my hand, but I guess it could do some damage to more delicate flesh (a mouse’s ear for instance). I’ve seen terrible wounds inflicted on Russian hamsters by other Russian hamsters at the nature centre where I work. Trouble is, I reckon he’s a bit of a ponce. I mean, come on, he lives in a fucking Pringles tube on a nutritionally balanced diet in a temperature-controlled room. Fight or flight scenarios are limited to him seeing a hazy apparition beyond the glass of his tank, wondering if it might be something dangerous and then suddenly noticing his food bowl’s been refilled. In fact, there is no fight or flight with Craig, just a kind of catatonic submission. Were I to live so simple and innocent a life as his I think I’d happily spend my days swinging like a monkey. His twitching nose is probably some complex form of rodent body language full of exacting inflection; and he’s saying to me: “Ha ha! You twat! You go to work all day then come home and feed me. I get to fuck around! Look, I’m a lemur!” I feed my hamster any old thing as long as it’s not too sweet. Fibre is the special on the blackboard every day – as it should be for all of us, I feel. Fibre, and plenty of it. Every little nut- or kernel-shaped reform of machine-masticated stuff that I drop in there is the equivalent of a plywood sandwich to us. And yet he gorges himself on them. Nuts are his favourite though, with a little broccoli now and then. I hear that too much green gives hamsters the shits; but as, when cleaning him out, I simply tip his entire world into a black bag and start again I wouldn’t be able to tell you if he’d been hiding the crown jewels under all that sawdust.

Thursday, day 1 (Plankton)

So, here we are and welcome all, fair folk of the world, to The Short Claw, the urn of my mind tipped up (with sobriety I hope) over everyman’s tankard. The Short Claw, aside from being a gathering of daily thoughts, comes complete with a mission: to bring to light the shadier corners of the animal kingdom … less to jam the wedge of scientific enlightenment in there (for he that breaks a thing to see what it’s made of has left the path to wisdom) and more to hopefully bring a giggle. So let’s at the outset turn out the sack of my own philosophy on the cavalcade of fauna that surrounds us poor homonids, and of how we relate to them. I… no, I’m going the wrong way about this. Bullet points would be a lot easier:

- Humans and animals are not equal. Animals are cooler. They’re so cool they don’t even have to speak.
- Cages and glass tanks fill me with sadness, and yet I continue to keep animals in them, and continue to work in establishments that do the same. I don’t know why this is.
- Any opinion voiced with conviction regarding animal welfare is contradictory (which is something of a double negative I know).
- At some point in the future the world is going to explode and every living thing will burn up into nothing. If the period of time between now and then can be quantified as a packet of Smarties, your life is the amount of time it takes to look for the little perforated red strip along the seal. This said, it’s important to fill that time looking at things in childish wonder rather than debating whether your actions are right or wrong.
- Animals are wholly innocent. So are humans. Don’t ever blame anyone for anything. If what they’ve done has pissed you off, consider whether it’s enough to kill and eat them. The same applies to animals.
- Spending time with animals lowers blood pressure. Lowering blood pressure promotes longevity. If, from today, you decided to shun the human world and spend the rest of your days with animals that have no concept of who or what you are except the means to an easy meal, you will live to be a thousand years old. Trust me on this one.
- Eating animals is one thing. Beating them up is something else. If you do this, I will find the person you love the most and kill them. This does not apply to large animals, of course. If you punched a hippo it would just laugh.
- Drinking milk you’ve personally squeezed from an animal or eating eggs you’ve pilfered from nests is as close to God as you’ll ever get.
- If you’re being chased by a rhino, run in zig-zags. If you’re being chased by a crocodile run in a straight line.
- It’s always struck me as funny that everyone I know would rather go to the seaside on holiday and not a landfill site, and yet there’s loads of seagulls at both. Can’t they distinguish or something? Eh? Eh? Answer me! Damn you!

Well, that’s about it for now. As you see my personal philosophy is fairly objective, predominantly exhaustive. I’d be interested to read any comments you’d care to send me on any of the above, but remember I’ve just made them up on the spot. Tomorrow I’ll probably be somebody else entirely.