This is a very moral story in pictures about what happens when you walk on people.

You get EATEN. Yes. By the cute docile guys. You get eaten.

Wonder if I could make a silk purse out of it?

Interspecies Loving, or, Get-You-In-The-Mood Friday #1: classic cat and dog

This edition of Interspecies Lovin' Friday might just have an anthropological edge for the same money, so hang on in for the ride. Today, we are featuring the classic dog and cat scenario: a volatile and needy situation at the BEST of times.

Here we have a classic moment of edge of interspecies cuteness. The cat finds the chihuahua so godammed cute, he just can't stop himself... these things are so often about subdom issues when it comes down to it.


In the next video, it is clear what is going on is that the siameses had been bored of each other's company for a very very long time, the sheer sameness of it all. And then the puppy arrived... The classic three lover relationship. The love seems to be truly shared around. Note that the dog is not a chihuahua. Only with this species variation could this situation be so harmonious.


The following pair of videos, when viewed in tandem, will help you to learn something. Ok, so look at this first. The picture of interspecies grooming harmony (with a little subdom edge, clearly, if you scrape the vaseline lensed surface away). There is simply no question about it: the chihuahua is this cat's bitch.



Now. Take a look at this. Same cat. Same chihuahua. But realer. More complicated. Also the introduction of cat #2. We are ready for more.



Have you noticed how the cats are ALWAYS the dominant partner?



But can they really get along? I mean, outside of the sofa, the bed, the livingroom floor? Tune in next friday! We might have donkeys. I am not promising anything, Cindy.

This is a video of a fox who has clearly fallen in love with this trampoline

There's been some talk of animals on trampolines lately over on my other home, clusterflock, which sent me in search of this. I think you will understand it was worth the quest.

Sheep shit/ Thought shit

Dublin this past weekend was pouring pouring rain like a monsoon pours. It was kind of fun, taking pictures of people huddling together under umbrellas while running, like eager three legged race runners. There's a kind of pitch of excitement that happens when there's a real downpour, a gorgeous smell in the air, something about it I love.

You know, it's cold here in Ireland this past couple of days. Actually cold. Tights weather, boots weather, though I am holding off. There is constant and heavy rain. My mother speaks of Egypt like it's calling her to its heat. Only two weeks ago I was living in shorts.

Today on my wet walk through the local wilderness here in Clare, I met some wildish horses, some were mares suckling their foals, and there was a stallion who was sniffing deeply, savouring the aroma from a dusky mare's hind quarters as she carefully positioned her rump in front of him, and twitched her tail. God, the things women could do if we had tails.

I stopped to watch them. He sniffed at her, then rubbed his nose against the grass, against his legs, sniffed the air, she danced a couple of graceful paces ahead of him, twitching that tail, and stood before him once more. He followed, she led, thus. I wondered why he wasn't mounting her. I was standing what I considered to be a subtle distance away from them, but clearly it wasn't subtle enough: he craned his neck around and stared right at me for several seconds. I moved on, looking behind me every now and then, to see one or other of them looking behind them at me.

Then it was my turn with sheep, to get up close and proximate. A sheep's baa up close is a different thing altogether, you can feel the baa, rather than just hear it. There were lots of mothers calling to their smallish lambs, their teenaged lambs, and lots of smallish and teenaged lambs baaing back (different tones). Sheep tend to move in a flock, and they're not too keen on humans. Maybe this has something to do with humans' peculiarly keen appetite for eating sheep's babies, who knows, but they tend to run in a hobbledy kind of way when a human is in their path. And so I climbed a little down the hillside, and let them pass, baaing and hobbling and jogging with the bright blue and red splodges of spray paint decorating their backs.

My shoes were covered in shit when I got home. It occurred to me that sheep, goats, horses and cows, any animal that lives in fields principally, shits and eats in the same place, but they probably don't get sick because it's just grass, cycling itself. Sheep shit, horse shit, even cow shit, doesn't smell bad to me. It's rich with wildness. Sure I get thrills from big cities too, but these long walks I take around here are such pleasures.

I was plagued with intense thoughts of the kind that insist themselves but can never be resolved as thoughts. Maybe some day they'll just go away. I'll take sheep shit over thought shit any day.