General Chat

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

........ :-S

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

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.

...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

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

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

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

No Maggie, the cats like Arabica but the dogs insist on Robusta ;-) then they have money left for extra bones :-D

A Russian legend explains the antipathy between dogs and cats by stating that the devil has tricked the dog and cat each into thinking the other has its rightful fur :-D

It could be because they communicate differently, also, dogs naturally chase smaller prey, as do cats - so the dog sees a cat as potential prey.
Some cats run, others hiss and fight back.

I had 3 cats. Two had never lived with a dog - the third one (Sophie) had been the neighbours cat (and then abandoned), but they'd had a dog as well as Sophie.
My daughter had a GSD/Collie cross dog, that had never lived with cats.
We actually had no problem.
Initially the cats would stay away - apart from Sophie, who would occasionally go up to the dog and swipe her (with her paw, not her claw), then, after a short time, they all tolerated each other in a relaxed way.
But the dog would still chase the neighbours cats out of the garden.

Actually, we also had two 'free range' guinea pigs at this time (potential prey for all of them!).
If the cats got too near, they'd get their paws nipped - they could easily have killed the Guinea Pigs, but probably left them alone because they smelt of us humans!.
As for the dog, a few stern 'NO's soon let her know how to behave near them.

I think the transference of smell is pretty important - that's how they suss out who's friendly, so stroking them all at the same time confirms who's in the group.

Off topic, does any ne know why the hostility between cats and dogs ?

Nuff said!! :-D :-D :-D

Coffee, by value, is the world's second most traded commodity and given the slow exit of oil likely to become no.1.

I spent a year as a tea and coffee trader at Hay's Wharf in London working in C19 offices long since gone. The experience was all good - I learned a lot about commodity and futures trading, how to roast raw coffee beans and judge value and so on. The biggest bonus was travel to remote places to look at the plantations and their ways and means. Even then treatment of workers and the environment were factors. Coffee has the huge advantage of being a viable cash crop alternative to cocaine. It would be even more viable if western supermarkets stopped using it as a loss leader (with other people bearing the loss) in the same way as they do for milk.

Meanwhile my morning bowl of Arabica coffee (the French have no use for coffee and tea mugs) is an essential start to the day.

Dermot, I replace my cat flap (well, the cats' flap, really, I'd hate anyone to insinuate that I used, say, after a night out) every 3 years - so you got off lightly! :-D

David - cat's rarely argue back like teenagers, so, no, not really a replacement for children :-D
As for a replacement husband? I CAN mend the washing machine and the car!
And I certainly don't need a replacement husband that I'd have to look after, stroke his ego and possibly be constantly 'mansplained' to!

Oh, and the sort who, when you ask them where the coffee is, then go off on some great treatise about how the coffee plantations were wrong, this country, that country etc etc - rambling on and on, enjoying the sound of their own voice, not bothered in answering the question - just full of their own self absorption.
You know the sort!

Not that my ex was like that - but there are a lot of the allegedly male gender like that

:-D :-D :-D

The wishes and desires of children, regardless of age, are never changing always boiling down to money. Cats, mice and spiders though are inscrutable.

Snakes divide the world into the edible, the dangerous and the rest. Easy to predict their behaviour then and be safe. All indigenous populations where there are a lot of venomous snakes which regard humans as dangerous have worked out an accomodation with them.

Of course Europeans in Australia are not indigenous but feel that paranoia and destruction towards the local fauna by design or carelessness is ok or even funny. Sad.

Taking a hint from recent court decisions all Australian political offices should demand an ancestor resident in Australia before 1788.