I Don't Eat Rats

I have a dog and have had a dog for many years now. We are on out third and most probably last dog. I like Buster, but he can be an asshole at times. I’m sure if he had a blog he would be saying the same thing about me. He gives unconditional love and is always ecstatic whenever I come home. My love is a little more conditional than his, hinging on how loud he barks at nothing or if he decided that his bathroom is inside rather than out.

They say that you can tell if your wife or your dog loves you the most by locking them both in the trunk of a car. When you open it, the dog will jump all over you with love, your wife…not so much.

I was talking to some people today about squirrels and how I consider them to be bushy tailed tree rats. They disagreed and felt that they were cute. Maybe so, but those cute vermin dug up all of my bulbs one year and planted peanuts in their place. I wondered at the time where a squirrel would get their little hands on a bag of peanuts. They don’t have any money to buy a bag and I doubt they could carry a bag even if they did have a ready source of cash.

Peanuts just don’t grow in this area of the country. I don’t think that peanuts can grow in Canada at all. We have our share of nuts, but they are busy running the country up in Ottawa. I suppose there could be a black market peanut trade in the squirrel world, but where would the bushy tailed rats get money. Sure they could do an even trade with Squirrels in Georgia for an equal weight of Pine Nuts, but how would they ship them back and forth. There may be an underground railroad bypassing the customs and excise people, but that would take an incredible amount of sophistication and planning. Squirrels have very tiny brains; I don’t think they could pull it off.

It turns out that the neighbour across the street is feeding the little pests. He even has names for them, “Three toe”, “Shorty”, Chip”, “Dale” and “No tail”. The real “Chip” and “Dale” are chipmunks for Gods sake. I have names for them too, but they aren’t cute, they are more emotion based names. I have an emotion based name for my neighbour too.

When I brought up if anyone knew of an effective way of ridding my immediate area of the bushy rats, a couple of the women present seemed horrified. You would think I was describing how to butcher and cook a Panda using dolphin sauce. These same people watch the news every night that reports on the deaths of children around the world. Their only crime is to have been born in the wrong country. I am sure that they give money to help those poor kids, but they seem to be more horrified that a wild rat might get hurt.

We used to be an agricultural country and everyone knew that meat came from animals and those animals had to die for us to live. It is a part of life, we are at the top of the food chain and everything else is at the bottom. Well, probably not lions, tigers, panthers, wolves and sharks, but pretty much everything else that walks, flies or swims is just food.

I won’t be eating dog any time soon, but I will eat almost everything else. Well, not fish, I don’t like fish very much and probably not monkey either. Nor squirrel and I don’t eat rats!