Destruction!

 

Destruction!

                                Pansy and Clown (blue and chocolate)

Warning! If you are averse to animals, do not read on.

Polly spoke about her Labrador breeding friends and the destruction the puppies wrought, and it reminded me of our brief foray into breeding Burmese cats.

It had never been our intention to breed cats. We had had an accidental breeding of Jack Russells, which was fun for the children, and also why we ended up with four of them – JRs, I mean, though we did have four children, too.

My sister and brother-in-law had a beautiful brown Burmese, called Tip, because he had a white tip to his tail. A few years after I left home – the baby of the family - they gave my parents a little queen who had come to the end of her breeding programme (!) Liza gave them a great deal of pleasure and much appreciated the freedom and love they gave her.

When we decided to acquire a cat, we remembered how affectionate and curious Burmese cats were, and found a local breeder, who had a pretty little brown queen, a few months old. They encouraged us to breed from her, and we thought it would be interesting for the children. That encouragement is not generally given these days, but this was many years ago.

The kittens were enchanting. From Alicat we had brown, chocolate, blue and lilac offspring. Each child and its friends had different favourites, so, naturally, we ended up with quite a few cats.

Pansy Blue as a kitten

People often claim to ‘know’ that cats and dogs are instinctive enemies and cannot live together, and take pleasure in promulgating the myth. We have found them to be allies and friends. The cats groom the dogs’ heads and faces and the dogs step between arguing cats to defuse the situation, as they would with warring dogs.

              Cariadd, (Dalmatian) with six Burmese, one brown, one blue, three chocolates and a lilac. They would climb on her for comfort if they started arguing.

We were extraordinarily lucky with the Jack Russells, known chasers – and killers – of fur. When we brought Alicat home, I sat down, and Daisy JR jumped up on my lap! We never had a problem with them, but I would not risk it again. It just didn’t occur to us to worry.

Puppies are fun, adventurous, and messy, but they don’t climb. Kittens clamber up everything in sight, including people. The view from the top of someone’s head, or the curtains, is exciting and different. If there are no people or furniture available to ascend, the wallpaper will do.

Inevitably, the time came, at three months of age, to bid the kittens farewell to their new homes. Interviewing prospective owners was never a job we relished, but we wanted to ensure our little creatures went to loving homes. Equally, I felt we had to be honest about what they were taking on. Burmese kittens do not lie around looking beautiful, although they can. They are adventurous and curious and can get themselves into unusual hiding places.

We once lost a litter temporarily. We had put them in our en suite shower room, where we were sure they would be safe and could not escape. When I went in to check on them and feed them, I couldn’t see them anywhere. Our shower room is not vast and the window was securely closed. Panic set in momentarily but something caused me to look more closely at the bidet and sure enough, the kittens were tucked safely under the pedestal. They soon emerged for their food, and we found a different room for them to grow up in.

As well as giving prospective owners directions to our house, a task at which I am still very poor, I would test their resolve by telling them what to expect. If they were experienced cat people, they would quickly understand. One man put it succinctly – ‘So, we look for the house with the wallpaper hanging off in shreds.’ I agreed that was the case and he came to collect his kitten anyway.

While kittens may not eat the carpet or the plaster on the walls, or chew the door frame, your shoes, or anything else that takes their fancy, as puppies will, they have sharp claws, like needles. They will tear at your soft furnishings, turn the stair carpet into a series of scratching posts, scale the heights of the kitchen cupboards, and pierce your heart with their unbelievably silky fur and huge, lustrous eyes. A warm purring cat on your lap or next to you as you lie on your bed is worth more than a king’s ransom.

If dog/s join the cat/s, you are more blessed than you could imagine.

We haven’t bred puppies, or kittens for many years. It is exhausting, being responsible for so many tiny beings. Guinea pigs, mice and gerbils are much easier, but once our children grew out of the farming phase, we ceased breeding altogether. Oh, that is, until our youngest child was born. She came during the cat breeding phase. We must have got muddled, somewhere! 

Herbert with Bethan

A tin full of people

 

A tin full of people

  

     Image courtesy of 'Wikimedia Commons'

A baby sardine

Saw her first submarine:

She was scared and watched through a peephole.

 

‘Oh, come, come, come,’

Said the sardine’s mum,

‘It’s only a tin full of people.’

Spike Milligan (1918-2002)

I was reminded of this verse while watching a cruise ship departing Southampton. Very few liners have elegant lines these days and look more like container ships, which I suppose is what they are. The very largest look like floating blocks of flats.

In the small hours of the night they are sparsely lit, the passengers mostly asleep, and the crew members the only folk awake. When darkness falls and before the cabin calls, the liners blaze like a department store at Christmas and there is endless associated noise, much like a passing car on the road with its music playing at full volume.

The thrumming of the engines and the cacophony of the passengers do nothing to enhance the peace of the sea. Noise pollution can affect the hearing of marine animals, causing stress and changes in behaviour. Such changes may lead to population decline because of decreased reproduction rates.

Cruise ships are one of the major sources of air pollution worldwide, affecting the air quality of coastal cities and ports. A luxury cruise ship emits as much particulate as 1 billion cars.

You can read more about the effects of cruise liners here, here and here.

I know people enjoy their cruises - some go on two or three a year - but perhaps the cruise liner companies could find some way of assisting the unseen world they are so carelessly destroying. There must be a way to moderate unnecessary travel, leisure travel, if you will - make them more expensive to undertake, set a limit on how many cruises one person can make in a year? (That would open up a Black Market in ticket sales, I'm sure.) 

Something must be done before we destroy life in the oceans as efficiently as we are annihilating  life on terra firma. Sadly, many of the measures to save our environment are ill thought-out and amount to virtue-signalling and back tracking on promises. The only remedy is for humanity to  change its ways. There's little hope of that until probably far too late.

 Our beautiful blue planet is fast becoming a dirty brown dead planet, spinning endlessly in space. Space is the next great frontier and the next we will undoubtedly fight over and despoil, if we survive that long.

Humans are essentially self-centred. In the past we had to be, to survive. Now, we take and take without thought for the consequences and of how our descendants - our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and their children - will manage to live in a depleted world.

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’