FURTHERMORE
By Gerry Moran
So, if every dog has its day, where does that leave our feline friend the cat? Does every cat have its day? And if every cat has its day, what about big cats – the cheetah, the cougar, the lion. Do they all have their day? And what sort of a day is it? And, come to think of it, what sort of day does the dog have? A fine feed of Paddy Kenna’s steak and a dalliance with a delightful Dandie Dinmont Terrier perhaps.
Oh, and while I’m at it, does every cow have its day? And tell me it’s not that day out to the abattoir. That would be sad. Very sad. And what about the elephant? The rhinoceros? The giraffe? What sort of day might they have? And then there’s the Duckbill Platybus. God only knows what sort of day it might have?
As I think about it – do all creatures, great and small, have their day? Although I have no idea what this ‘day’ might entail. And then there’s the owl – does every owl have its night? Do all night creatures have their night? And although I’m well used to having a night out myself, I’d dearly love to know what a night-out might entail for these nocturnal neighbours of ours.
Now as I was typing this, a tiny creature scuttled across my computer screen. What was it? Have no idea. And where was it off to in such a hurry? On its night out I’d like to think. Good for it. And good it was scuttling quickly or it might have come to a sad end beneath my thumb. Some night out that would have been.
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Apart for making wonderful, loyal pets, dogs are very useful. A dog’s nose has 220 million olfactory cells compared to our 5 million. Dogs can be trained to find anything by smell – drugs, landmines, cadavers. They can even smell cancer. Doctors in California have found that Labradors can detect lung and breast cancer with greater accuracy than state-of-the-art screening equipment. The dogs correctly identified 99% of lung cancer sufferers and 88% of breast cancer patients by smelling their breath.
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Cats can see some six times better at night than us humans and need only a sixth amount of the light than a person does to make out the world around and are most active in the low light of dawn and dusk. As for inoffensive, placid cows, and wait for this, are fed magnets to cope with ‘hardware disease’ ie. the damage caused by the bits of wire and nails that they regularly swallow. The magnet sits in the first part of the stomach (there are four) and lasts the cow’s lifetime.
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Now. we all know about getting a ring in the barmbrack at Halloween but getting a magnet in your steak – at anytime would not be a pleasant experience. Imagine the scenario: Waiter: “How would, sir, like his steak?” Sir: “Medium rare, without a magnet.” And off the waiter scurries in a huff and on his high-horse.
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Horses, as it happens, feature on the menus of many cultures – not least in France. France’s partiality to horse meat allegedly dates back to the Battle of Eylau in 1807 when Napoleon’s surgeon-in-chief advised the starving troops to eat dead battlefield horses! Actually I was tempted to try the horse meat once in France but chickened out.
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Regarding poultry, people wrote with goose quills up to the 19th century. The word pen comes from the Latin ‘penna’ for feather while in the ancient world geese were the focus of fertility cults and goose fat was considered a powerful aphrodisiac. Even today the verb ‘to goose’ has a sexual connotation.
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Finally the phrase ‘to bark up the wrong tree’ comes from 19th century American hunting when dogs would chase animals like racoons up trees but sometimes mistakenly bark at the base of an empty tree while the prey escaped, symbolising a wasted effort or futile pursuit.
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Finally, finally, poodles were originally used for duck-hunting, the word comes from the German for ‘to splash in water’.
