Interactive Animals in the Real World
We may be lucky enough to get a visit from a wild animal.
In some cases, the visit can have unfortunate consequences.
Often it is just a harmless visit.
We may be lucky enough to establish interactivity with a wild animal.
Perhaps it is the animal that establishes interactivity with us.
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Two photographers are out filming on the savannah. One, Graham Springer, has positioned himself in the grass with his camera and a half-meter lens at a safe distance and is filming a family of lions who are relaxed in the grass. His colleague is standing by their Land Rover and keeping an eye on the landscape. What he hadn’t seen is that a lioness has quietly strutted in from the side to check out the situation. She walks past him unchallenged a few meters away and sniffs everything, while he stands stiff as a board, expecting to be torn apart the next second. When she thinks she has checked out the situation, she struts lazily back to the pride again. Predators that are not hungry are not hunting. But how do you know they are not hungry?
Video
It seems that animals often know more about us than we know about them. Where is the intelligence?
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The Kom-Obmo temple on the Nile south of Memphis/Luxor is dedicated to Sobek, the crocodile god. We call them ‘gods’ because we speak as we understand. All the old junk we come across is either proclaimed as places where the superstitious wretches fell on their asses for the ‘gods’, or they are burial chambers of a death cult. This is what is called in psychology a projection - what the heart is full of … The Egyptians called these figures per neters, personified forces of nature. They were visualizations of natural forces within and without man, so that we could understand and deal with the inner and the outer. The temples were institutions of initiation. Among other things, because they were also knowledge centers, political centers, health centers, economic centers, trade centers, etc. An adept who was to be initiated was sent on a tour to a number of temples, each with its own specialty in an aspect of human development potential.
The crocodile was the challenger of human fear. An adult Nile crocodile is a piece of ultimate horror. The adept was thrown down into an opening in the stone floor of the temple, from which it was not possible to come back up. Here there was - and still is - a long passage with niches in the sides. That’s where the crocodiles lay waiting, here were their nests. The adept had only one way out: by swimming along the passage past the crocodiles to the stairs at the other end. What he did not know was that the crocodiles had just been fed. A full crocodile could not dream of attacking a poor man swimming by. It will not disturb its own digestion. For his part, the poor man was terrified. Maybe he’s pooping in the water out of fear, which might make a crocodile that had a little room for a dessert frown, who knows?
When the adept, trembling but relieved, struggled up the stairs to the end of the passage, he was not the same as before. He had overcome his fear, and as the figure we know as Jesus said: Fear not. Death and resurrection is a very real ritual = psychotherapeutic development method in the initiation cults.
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Without any comparison to the potential danger of the situation for the lion photographers, I am sitting at my balcony table on an early and already warm morning in July 2024, writing. A giant wasp circles with a sound like a bomber and lands on the table in front of me. We have been told that giant wasps are deadly and aggressive, and that we should flee in panic. I choose to stay put and film the cousin. In terms of volume, it is perhaps 6-8 times as large as a regular wasp and as such quite impressive. You certainly don’t want to be stung by one like that. But why, I have always asked myself, would it be so damn aggressive and dangerous? Don’t we confuse it with the hornet and horsefly, which bite both people and animals without being asked? It strutted/rocked silently around the table for 20 minutes, after which I moved. Then it appeared again = it knew that I was there and had moved, after which it flew away.
5 minutes later I experienced a new visit from a creature. I have lots of butterflies at the moment: admiral, cabbage butterfly, lemon butterfly, thistle butterfly, peacock eye, nettle roof wing, grass edge eye (I think). Add a day moth, but it is technically a moth.
A nice admiral - those are the ones with orange stripes diagonally across the wings and at the back of the edge - lands on my terrace. I am sitting with bare legs and sandals, and then I think = I say to it in my head: Try jumping up on my big toe, that would be nice. And it did! It was very unexpected, because butterflies never land on people, they are far too sensitive-nervous for that. Later it moves to my shin. It is doing something with its long proboscis, but it is so ultralight that I can’t feel anything. I can always feel a fly landing, but this one is completely imperceptible.
I have to go inside and come back. But the same admiral returns and lands on me again. Now it’s impossible to get rid of. First of all, it shows that it has a memory. The big question, however, is: Does it have telepathic abilities and does it understand a message? A couple of days later I was explained what it could be interested in on my skin by a nature guide in South Zealand. It goes for the salt that sits in my sweat on a hot summer day. That makes perfect sense. A dog can also lick you off your leg if it can smell salt. A goat that finds a piece of rock where the rock salt sticks out starts to lick the rock all over.
Later, I’m sitting on my balcony again, and out of the corner of my eye I see something moving along the railing. I think it’s a butterfly, but it’s not. It’s one of the most shy birds in the neighborhood: the wren. The troglodyte. It’s so small that it’s the size of an insect. It weighs 10g, which is the equivalent of 9 raisins including wings! It thought it was going to jump along the edge of my balcony the day the animals decided that I was a research subject who wouldn’t hurt them.
The nature guide, my new acquaintance, tells a wasp story from his own home. He has a wasp nest in the attic, one of those flower-like, tissue-paper-thin Japanese works of art, if you’ve ever seen one like that. He had a bench made of untreated wood, and every day a wasp would come and work its way along the grain of the wood, peeling it, so to speak. That’s when he realized what the wasp was doing. The wood on his bench was used as material to build the fine wasp nest.
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In answer to that question, I have to repeat a story I got from a colleague a few years ago. Therese has a summer house on the island of Møn in the south eastern part of Denmark. She is not quite ordinary, and now you will understand why. Her house was visited by a group of ants, which she could do without. They are difficult to get rid of, because they have access through very small cracks in boards and panels. Instead of bombarding them with ant poison, she sat down on the floor and spoke to them. She said something like: Dear sweet-good-nice ants, thank you for your visit. Will you be so kind as to find another place to crawl around? Thank you very much in advance. After which they disappeared from one day to the next and have never come back since.
I personally don’t think, I have these abilities (but who knows?). I use another another trick, that is not poisonous and doesn’t kille the ants: cinnamon powder. They dont like it. The cinamon bark has a compound, which is the trees protection against ... ants and other bugs.
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It is not always possible to establish constructive interactivity with animals. It seems that flies, mosquitoes, ticks and slugs are beyond pedagogical reach. Mice are also somewhat non-communicative in this respect. Their instinctive life seems quite strictly defined = food - go!
On the other hand, if you can have a constructive conversation with ants, why not with these creatures?
Have we tried to establish interactivity?
Does anyone have a used flea circus for sale?
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Most people think of a big, angry blowfly as an annoying critter. Here it comes flying into the kitchen and cheekily sits on the table or, even worse, on the food. Yuck! there’s a fly, kill it, it’s disgusting, it’s just sat on a turd - SMACK!
And then we know that blowflies lay eggs in food, and out come fly larvae, maggots - even more disgusting!!
But there is also another way of looking at it. The blowfly is a useful and quite indispensable animal in nature. It is an extremely efficient garbage collector, making sure that nothing lies rotting and polluting the ecosystem. It goes after dead animals that lie and stink. Its lichen is ready in a few days, and it itself has a fairly short life cycle, which is nature’s own stopping mechanism, so that its numbers do not grow to trillions. Its larvae live for 4 days, during which they gobble up, it itself lives for 20-25 days.
The larvae are proven to go for rot. They love it, and they are very picky, if you can use that expression. When they are done, there is simply no more rot left. People have started to cultivate fly larvae and use them for wound treatment. An inflamed wound can be cleaned by placing a stack of larvae, and then they start. It should tickle quite a bit. But as soon as they reach the healthy flesh, they stop. The wound is now completely clean, without the need for harsh chemicals. Scar formation should also be reduced, it is said.
I had the help of a couple of blowflies recently. There was an annoying sweet smell in my room. I knew what it was, it was a dead mouse lying in a place where I couldn’t reach it. The poor creature had eaten some alpha grains and had a bad stomach ache. Glory to its memory, and now it was lying there and became a bit … hidden. But then the fly came and laid its eggs, the larvae ate the mouse, and now there is probably some kind of dry mouse mummy lying there for some time, someone is pulling down the walls and panels. Of course, a whole bunch of blowflies came out, all of which nimbly and a little lethargically sat on the glass pane of the balcony door so they could be let out. Thanks for a job well done.
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There is a famous coach for dogs and perhaps especially for dog owners. His name is Cesar Millan. Americans love him, and you can understand it when you see his stylish online demos of how, with very simple means, he can get an unruly dog to behave exemplary in half a minute. But it is more than an entertainment show-off, where you have to say “nooooo” and clap your hands on American TV shows, like you would clap for a magician. Because the next thing he does after the demo is get the dog’s owner to do the same. Here it turns out, not surprisingly, that it is the owner and not the dog that is the problem. But it also turns out that it is always a question of a very simple but definite adjustment of attitude and behavior towards the dog that decides the matter. It also shows that this is what the confused dog has been waiting for and asking for all along. The owner starts by being very nervous, then speechless and finally: Why didn’t I know this before?
And then you think: Hmm - isn’t it exactly the same with parents in relation to their children? Isn’t it the same lack of mastery of simple loving authority enforcement that has created a generation of unruly, sociopathic curling-fucked-up children? Isn’t that exactly what the little screaming, boundary-seeking-crossing brat is begging-and-begging for with all his unconfirmed unnessaryness?
Cesar Millan’s simple but impressively effective method cannot be done without love and trust. If you hate or fear your dog - or your child, same-same - and don’t trust their true nature, it won’t work.
An aggressive dog is a symptom, it is a thermometer of its owner’s constitution. Unless we are talking about a neglected dog that has gone mad or a dog with rabies, the dog’s aggression is its protective instinct. If the owner is insecure, the dog will sense it immediately and protect her/him from everything, other dogs and animals, cars, vacuum cleaners and evil lawnmowers, other people, whatever. The dog sees it as its job to protect its owner, who is the leader of its pack. That is, unless the owner is so little of a leader that the dog becomes the owner’s leader.
So it is the owner who has to learn something and change his/her behavior. Then the dog will probably figure it out. A big mistake that insecure nervous dog owners make is trying to calm the dog down with a rewarding, babbling tone of voice. It is rewarding aggression. The owner must show the way and give the dog a task. The dog should be rewarded for relaxing, not for being on the go. It should go on the go when it is the task and get the stick or the shame-shot duck - AND hand it back again, after which it should calm down.
And again: Isn’t this exactly the same mistake that curling parents make with their children. Modern parents don’t dare to put their authority at risk, because uuuh the little prince and princess must not suffer harm - but they suffer harm precisely because of the lack of authority and clear signals. We have a lose-lose situation. The result is constantly borderline-crossing sociopaths who are a pain-in-the-ass in the company of others. And at some point the race is over for the sociopath, and they have to be in adult company at workplaces and in social spaces. Do we know the type? It has become a bit too common.
As a multimedia teacher, I had an adult student who was a former postman and who didn’t want to be a postman anymore. It was at that time that the postal service started abusing their employees, forcing them to run around with their tongues hanging out of their throats. He told me about a house where there was a very aggressive dog. It was especially aggressive when its owner was further down in the garden, and it knew it was being seen. It wasn’t able to go through the gate and deliver its mail, and it was at that time that it wasn’t legally required to have a mailbox outside the gate. At one point he had enough of the scumbag - or rather the dog’s scumbag owner, who didn’t lift a finger. After that he shouted at the owner: If you don’t control your dog immediately, I’ll kill that motherfucker!! He must have been very convincing, because the owner got a shock and immediately stepped into character with the dog. After that there were never any problems.
Weeel, but that theory doesn’t fit, because the bikers have aggressive fighting dogs, and they are self-confident and not afraid of anyone.
BEEP! That shows why it’s not a theory, and that you haven’t understood the biker attitude. It’s EXACTLY because they’re afraid that they’ve put on their tough facade. They’re afraid of everything, they’re afraid of each other in the hierarchy, who are afraid of the bikers in the other gangs, they’re afraid of the police, they’re afraid of their old mother, and either they were afraid of their father because he was just as stupid a pig as they were, or he was a jerk who wasn’t there when the boy needed him, so now the boy in the adult body is afraid of his own shadow, and the deeply insecure and identity-weak boy-young-man has sought the false security and recognition in a gang with its strongly forced authority. So the aggressive fighting dogs of the bikers are just another example of the dog being a symptom of the owner’s lack of natural-genuine authority.
The Pitbull Terrier is known as an excellent family dog that loves children and old ladies.
It just shouldn’t have a master who is an underdog himself.
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The bird of prey. A falconer knows that it is certainly possible to interact with these deadly beak-and-claw-equipped creatures. Possibly not the largest of their kind, because there are not many examples of domesticated bearded eagles, black Spanish eagles, Harpy eagles and condors - that is, the caliber that is capable of flying away with an infant in its talons. But everything below that in size is possible to interact with. This also applies to the great horned owl with the very telling Latin name Uhu Uhu. - which is not really Latin but more like baby language, because what does the owl say? uhu uhu! What does the cow say mooh-mooh …
I live in a place with birds of prey. There are kestrels, buzzards, sparrowhawks, white-tailed eagles, night owls + various vagrants. The place also has everything they live on: mice, sparrows, ducks, partridges, pheasants, hares, u-name-it. Isn’t a barn swallow also a bird of prey, since it feeds on insects caught in the air? Aren’t most birds birds of prey, since they do the same thing, what about the blackbird, which eats earthworms, what about the duck, which eats snails and beetles? OK, so the definition of a bird of prey is that it exclusively eats fallen prey, and that it has a special design of beak and claws. That’s what we’ll say.
Direct interaction with birds of prey may not be the right word. Nevertheless, my neighbor has put up a falcon box in his big tree, and every year a pair of kestrels come and settle down and form a family = make young. They are fully aware of human presence, but it’s the way with animals that they keep the right distance from other animals and humans, and then they-and-we figure it all out. It’s not about fear and hostility, but about proper distance and coexistence. A friend of mine lived in a home-built wooden house, where a pair of grass snakes lived underneath. They ate all the annoying mice, and she provided them with a snake nest. Symbiosis translated into cohabitation.
One day I was sitting on my patio bench one day, writing. Then a large bird lands on my railing 3-4 meters away, body height approx. 35 cm, not a small bird. It turns out to be a young kestrel, which is in the process of investigating the area. Since I am sitting completely still, it has not identified me as a living creature. Predators have a directional gaze and react to movement. If you are completely still, they may not notice you, you are just a board to them, a post, a tree. As it takes off and wants to fly towards me, it notices that I am sitting there, and it turns in the air close to my head and flies away. For a split second I think, now it will plant its claws in my face, but we are extremely rarely on the predators’ menu.
People who have had close encounters with orcas/killer whales can attest to this. Even swimming around in the water with these killer machines, there are no reports of them eating the swimmers. The swimmers simply weren’t on their menu, even though they are the same size, texture and nutritional value as seals and sea lions. Have they also sensed with their sophisticated sensory apparatus that humans are a creature in the same category as themselves? That’s a good question.
Well - it was the birds of prey that we came from.
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We know that dogs have a good sense of smell. Not just reasonably good - extremely good!
This doesn’t just mean that various smells reach its ultra-fine nostrils, because that would probably be annoying, it would be a chaos of smells. If humans had such a sense of smell, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. It’s bad enough that old apartments are so leaky between floors that we can smell that the person upstairs is frying bacon and the person downstairs is smoking a cigar, but that’s at the rough end of the scale. We have, which animals of course also have, a kind of unconscious sense of smell, where scent hormones = endorphins between people are sensed. According to science, endorphins should be species-specific, so that humans only react to humans and not animals - and vice versa.
The dog, on the other hand, is able to handle these many smells. I once had a conversation with an elderly man. He says: I have diabetes, and when I lie down and have a nap and have forgotten to take my insulin, or my blood sugar for some reason has become a little too low, my dog comes and wakes me up. It can simply smell my blood sugar, and it knows that I have to do something about it! Talk about an intelligent sense of smell.
As you know, dogs are used for everything that has to do with smell. Tracking down game, escaping prisoners, smuglers of cannabis - so release the fricking canabis so we can move on and do something about heroin and fentanol instead!
The authorities don’t do that, because, like the cowardly bastards they are, they have sniffed out that the dope industry is run by, among others, the CIA and NATO, and they shouldn’t insult them, should they?
Dogs can also smell if people have cancer.
And they can smell your mood, and whether you are scared, sad-depressed or happy-relaxed.
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How are we to understand the difference between animals and humans! Or the similarity.
We could also ask what humans are.
If we are half animal and half human, what is the other half?
The difference is not biological. We have the same organs, the same chemistry, the same nervous system, etc. Both animals and humans have consciousness and intelligence. And here we cannot bear discussions with hardcore materialists about whether living beings and the rest of nature are just purposeless machines without consciousness and intelligence. We cannot bear that nonsense.
The difference is also not an emotional life. Animals are bursting with emotions, they are experts in emotions. Their special intelligence and emotional capacity are superior to normal modern humans, because civilized humans have forgotten these abilities that humans who live in nature still have. Their sensory apparatus is extremely well developed. They learn through imitation and play. They have memory - to remember like an elephant means to remember 50 years later. Animals do not forget. So what is it that is special about humans?
The code word is self-awareness. We know what we are doing, we can reflect on it and consciously change strategy and attitude. We are aware that we are conscious. We can create. We have a special bone just above the larynx that allows us to have advanced language. We have the ability to abstract.
Animals have many mental abilities, but they are beings who live in the moment. They are not self-aware. They do not have creative abilities, and they cannot speak like humans. Not that they cannot build a nest or otherwise arrange their environment, but they only have one specific way of doing it. They have lots of sounds and communicate with each other all the time, but it is a series of standard sounds with specific meanings for different situations.
This is not a simple subject. Here is a philosophical statement that comes from ancient times.
Animals have an essence, humans do not have an essence. This is an ontological matter, a question of being. Hamlet says: To be or not to be, that is the question. Animals ARE. They have an essence, they are in a state of being. Humans are constantly becoming something, for example, a human being. Be ein Mensch, as it is called in Yiddish, a real and complete human being. A newborn baby or a 4-year-old child is - and this sounds quite insulting to the curling parents of today - not a human being yet. It must first become a human being, and we must help it on that path. Animals do not write history about what they once were, what they are right now, and what they might become in time. Time does not exist for them. They respond every day to the rising of the sun and every evening to its setting. There is only one day in their life. They follow the rhythm of the day and night. They also follow the rhythm of the year. But they don’t write almanacs or diaries. They don’t plan or project.
They can prepare for winter by gathering supplies as a squirrel or eating themselves fat as a bear. But they don’t reflect on it and they don’t know why.
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Moose are impressive creatures. Among other things, they are good swimmers. Years ago a poor moose that swam across the Øresund between Sweden and Denmark only to be tragically run over by a local train in North Zealand. What a tragic end of a heroic achievement. There was actually also a moose that swam even further and ended up in Frederikshavn. Here it waded into the local nature park, where it still exists. It swam an a minimum 60 kilometers, which is twice the distance across the English Channel.
The famous astronomer and scientist Tycho Brahe had a tame moose, a pet moose. It walked around his grounds at the observatory on the island of Hven in Øresund - today Swedish. Once he had guests who thought they were very funny, so they fed the moose fermented berries, so that it became stiff as a rock. The poor animal fell down the stairs in a trance.
A more innocent story was the Swedish king, father of the current one, who had become a little senile. He was involuntarily forced to attend to some royal wedding, the priest was possibly a bit boring, and he probably hadn’t had his midday nap that day. On the other hand, he might have been moose hunting recently. As a hunter, you know that you don’t want to be shot by your own hunting party, which is why they go around wearing luminous vests today so as not to be mistaken for an animal. So the old king fell asleep during the ceremony. Suddenly he wakes up in the middle of a bad dream and shouts out into the church: I’m not a moose, don’t shoot I’m not a moose!
And moose hunt is quite big in Sweden. Moose can be a problem for car drivers on the Swedish road winding through endless forests. Suddenly a moos decides to run over the road, and it is so big and solid, that if it crashes into the front of a car, the vehicle is total-damaged. Therefore the Swedish may decide to use extra solid grids placed at the front - more solid than the aussies use for free jumping kangaroos doing the same stunt.
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Here is another story about swimming animals. A beaver from northern Germany took a serious swim up to southern Denmark. Here it invaded a children’s institution located by a stream, where it began to sweep around with the little post-toddlers in the institution, since it, not surprisingly, like many other animals, has a territorial instinct. The employees of the children’s institution chose the good solution: To give the creature with the powerful incisors a reserve = a territory, so that it could develop its dam project, and the children could learn something about funny, enterprising and interactive animals.
Mouse hunt
I have an ambivalent relationship with mice. As a country house owner, there is plenty to take and more where they come from. Since mice are food for almost all predators of a certain size, the mouse’s only response is to run away, hide and, incidentally, fuck its brains out so that it constantly reproduces. Mice are cute and charming creatures, and they are a pain-in-the-ass.
A mouse needs a hole less than a centimeter to get its head through, and then its body is flexible and will probably follow. And if the hole is not big enough, hey! it makes it bigger, since it always carries its toolbox with a sharp set of chisels.
2024 has been a record mouse year for my country house. I have caught about 15 mice indoors. I know where the mouse hole is, and my dilemma is that if I close it, I won’t catch mice that live in the skunk. I recently fought off a smart mouse. It refused to go into the trap, and I don’t use the classic model, which always makes your fingers blue when you try to arm it. In my model, which is extremely effective, the mouse has to squeeze through an opening because it can smell a raisin with peanut butter or a delicious date inside. This is where it will pull the trigger and the trap will snap. Normally it will snap around the mouse’s neck, and since the animal breathes once a second or more when it is stressed, it will snap quickly. But sometimes it will snap around its head, and then it will not suffocate immediately. If it is a larger mouse, it can make the trap almost jump across the floor when it tries to wriggle free.
Mice are active at night, usually between 3-5 of them. But this smart mouse is able to make the trap snap for a long time without it getting stuck. OK, so it doesn’t get the reward, but it survives. And then I’m sitting at my desk one bright day, and I hear that Mouse has come out of its hole by some radiator pipes. It shows its cute side, because it has found a walnut that has fallen out of a bowl on the table. It must actually be the one that made it fall out of the basket and over the edge of the table. A full-grown walnut is the size of half a mouse, and this mouse was able to grab the nut with its front paws and tried to lift it on two hind legs to the hole and stuff it through, just like a squirrel, only not as effectively. Unfortunately, the hole was too small for the nut, so it didn’t work. It tried 3 times, and I decided to let it run as a thank you for the circus performance. A few days later it fell into the trap. Right now, as a serial mass murderer, I am busy killing its family.
When I get rid of them, they’re as stiff as boards. I think it’s called rigor mortis. I usually dump them in a very specific spot by my big birch tree in the middle of the yard. Within 24 hours they’re gone. Who the hell eats dead mice as stiff as boards? I’m sure it’s not a cat, because it wants fresh produce. We’re going to move into the scavenger genre. My best bet is crows. What do you think?
Do you remember the movie Mouse Hunt (1997)? One of the most amazing and hilarious films sold as a children’s film, but I just want to say that as an adult I laughed my ass off. It’s not an animated film, because they trained hundreds of mice to do the wildest stunts. It’s an old-school special effects movie at its best, and you can experience a number of star actors such as Christopher Walken as a very fierce pest control man who can’t get rid of the pest. I’ve been thinking of him a lot recently, I feel for him ;-)
A single clip, and you know what I’m talking about:
Mouse Traps
In ancient Russia, there was a special and effective way to get rid of gnawing livestock. If there were too many of them in the winter - and they seek shelter indoors to keep warm - the family would turn off the stove and move over to the neighbor’s or cousin Vladimir and his wife Olga and their 7 children for a week, because they had a guest house. Of course, they contributed appropriately to the household. When they returned, the uninvited livestock had frozen to death in 30-400 cold. King Winter i Russia is no joke, just ask Napoleon and Hitler. Or ask NATO. May they freeze their imperialist butts off!
Cat in own backyard
Cats are professionel hitmen. They kill anything that moves of a certain size: mice, rats, moles, birds, hare kittens. And they eat them - except for the rats, which they can’t stand. Can’t blame them.
In countries where snakes are a problem, they hire cats to fight them. They are just as effective as the mongoose. Cats are not at all afraid of snakes. Cats are not afraid of other animals that threaten them. There are examples of cats chasing away wolves, bears, foxes, coyotes and full-grown crocodiles. And dogs. A single angry, hair-raising, back-arching, hissing backyard cat can maul a whole handful of dogs at once. Watch out for Rollo’s sensitive wet snout, the little syls arrive at 200 km/h and make a noise! Why isn’t the cat afraid of snakes, for example? It is confident in its secret weapon. A cat in good shape has a reaction time of between 20-70 milliseconds and you actually need a high-speed camera to film it. It can move its entire body at once, whereas a snake can only strike with the front part of its body and has a significantly slower reaction time.
The cat’s teeth are only used to finish off a fight with a snake, but before that it exhausts the snake by pelting it with its paws and claws. It is like a lightning-fast champion boxer or Bruce Lee kung-fu fighter who does not go into the close and closing fight until the decisive right blow that knocks out the opponent has been delivered. It has its jab, its left hook, its uppercut. When the time is right and the right angle is there for a split second, the cat goes for the neck right behind the head. It often starts running with the prey so that it cannot wriggle around it. So a cat of course does not try to take down a large python, but it does not get out of the way of a well-grown cobra or rattlesnake.
In every continent in the world, the apex predator is a big cat. In Asia it is the tiger, in Sri Lanka it is the leopard, in Africa it is the lion + leopard and cheetah, in North America it is the puma, in South America it is the jaguar, in the Himalayas it is the snow leopard. In Europe-Siberia it is the lynx, but most places in Western Europe lack the large continuous forest areas. However, the lynx is found in Eastern Europe in the Carpathians (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia). The Iberian lynx is also found in Spain, where there is what the lynx requires: large sparsely and preferably uninhabited areas, and Spain is the most sparsely populated country in Europe. In ancient times there were lions in Southern Europe, and they were even a head taller than the African lion today, but the Romans exterminated them. 50,000 years ago there were seriously large cats that roamed North America and Europe. The cat is simply the most effective predator in all places and times.
But you may notice that there is a continent missing with a big cat: Australia. There has not been a big cat … until now. That is, unless you go back to the Pliocene (5-2 million years ago) and the subsequent Pleistocene time to 12,000 years ago, when there was a marsupial lion, Thylacoleo. There are rock paintings that show hunters probably fighting such a beast - but it could also be the Thylocene, the Tasmanian tiger, where the painter has exaggerated its size. But we are getting off topic a bit, because in terms of species, neither of them are cats but marsupials and wolves with stripes, respectively.
Nature and the whole of biology seem to have a knack for delivering a big cat when, as is the case today, a vacuum has arisen for it, and in Australia it happens in a strange way. When English sailors arrived a few hundred years ago, they brought ship’s cats with them. Someone had to take care of the rats that had escaped aboard the ports. They took them with them as pets, of course, when they later settled down. As pets, cats rarely grow large. The largest domestic cats are, exceptionally, the Mancoon and the Siberian cat, and they are peaceful domestic animals that thrive best with people.
But when enough cats get loose and become 100% wild, something seems to happen - that is, unless they are the big uber-cats that already exist elsewhere. They start to grow big. Wild cats have now been observed in Australia weighing up to 15 kilos and more, which is the size of a medium-sized lynx such as the Canadian. They take down wallabies and other game that don’t stand a chance. There are also examples of them attacking humans - although they haven’t taken down humans … yet. On the other hand, they have taken down domestic cats. So who knows how big they can get if they are allowed to? Presumably no larger than is needed in the habitat where there is room for them, and there are no wild animals in Australia the size of lion and tiger food.
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The house cat is a different matter. But the house cat phenomenon has taken a strange commercial turn. A post on the Danish Animal Welfare Association states that it will cost DKK 7,000 per year (a 1000$) to have a cat - what!? That’s sick. It goes straight into the pockets of two industries that make money from it: pet shops and veterinarians. Little Meower needs a nice bed, he needs to be activated with toys and a scratching post so that he doesn’t tear up the sofa, he needs to be vaccinated, have a medical check-up every year, be neutered/sterilized, dewormed, put on a collar because otherwise he’ll be bitten by the cat catcher, he needs tons of cat litter and shit, he needs delicious and organic cat food.
An outdoor cat that lives in the outhouse and barn out in the countryside needs a fraction of that. Or rather, the cat doesn’t need any of that, because it is able to fend for itself, it catches its mice, although it would appreciate some dietary supplements, and if it starts shitting white intestinal worms, it will of course benefit from a worming treatment, but that doesn’t add up to that horrible amount of money a year! A cat is happy with an old box on a beam in the barn with a blanket in it. Give a cat a cardboard box and it will move into it. Cat litter is ridiculous, because a cat with access to the outdoors 24/7 shits in a secluded corner of the plot and covers it up.
The farm cat in the old days used to rarely come into the house, and it was happy with a bowl of freshly milked cow’s milk a day with clots of cream on top. Never give your cat pasteurized-homogenized milk! It kills it. It also kills people or makes them sick, but we’re not talking about that, are we? Even semi-domestic cats can live off what people live off of. The same goes for dogs. They do like their meat raw and not fried, but they won’t go for it if there’s chilli on the steak. Potatoes and brown gravy also go down well. There is no such thing as a vegetarian cat. You can reduce canned food considerably. The outdoor or farm cat doesn’t give a damn about ‘activating’ toys, even though it still thinks it’s fun to play with a string and pretend it’s a mouse.
But people absolutely want indoor cats on the 4th floor in cities, and then they have to pay the fucking 7,000 kr it takes to keep a nature-loving animal in that kind of children’s zoo.
Elsewhere in the world’s cities, they have a less commercialized relationship with cats. Istanbul is famous for its city cats. They live in the perfect climate in the urban jungle. They live in the thousands of small enclaves that the Turkish non-clinical building style in the old quarters offers. They have nothing against humans, on the contrary, but they are not dependent on them as such. They are a culturally valued part of the street scene. They are not necessarily 100% domesticated, but they are not wild. There are even cat cafes where you can grab a cat and make it purr on your lap. Just ask, are mice and rats a serious nuisance in the cat capital of Istanbul? They like to hang out at the local markets, where a treat falls, because the owners of the stalls know that they are making sure to keep the area free of rodents. And they are completely free of charge. If you told an inhabitant of Istanbul that in Denmark you can expect to pay 7,000 kr a year to have a cat walked, he would say: Bu çok saçma! That’s ridiculous!
The attitude of the Istanbulites is symbiosis with the cat.
The attitude of the suburban-city Danes is trained-over-spoiled-lappet.
The cat in ancient Egypt was considered a sacred animal. There was a cat goddess or a neter, a force of nature called Sekhmet. Even in the leading agricultural countries of ancient times, people didn’t care about mice and rats and snakes, so of course they had a cat. Being a sacred animal meant that it was a respected domestic animal that was not allowed to be harmed or killed. But in addition to the basic and practical aspects of cats, they were also considered to have spiritual abilities. They could read people’s basic state, and the Egyptians had great respect for beings who could see into the other world. The Egyptians would even mummify a cat so that they could follow them into the afterlife, the duat. Cats could heal and be ‘asked for advice’ if you understood their language. If you have ever had a purring cat lying next to you, then you may have a feeling for what soothing and possibly even healing frequencies feel like. It is impossible to be stressed, and chronic, unresolved stress promotes disease.
The Norse/Vikings had a slightly harsher approach to cats due to a harsher climate with lower odds of survival… except: They furred them and made cat skins for their winter clothing.
Finally, Kevin Richardson in the stiffest suit there is playing football with a bunch of lions out in the bush in South Africa. Don’t try this at home.
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Animals We Love to Hate is a book by nature guide, lecturer and author Vicky Knudsen, which I came across at the library the other day. It is funny and well-written and good for both children and adults. And of course it has good illustrations and photos. Probably only available in Danish.
You can almost already guess some of the animals, and there are also a few on this page. There are flies, hornets and ants. As mentioned, the blow fly was a symptom that we had some rotten meat lying around. We just have to be careful not to provoke the hornets or get them under our clothes, because then they will have an attack of claustrophobia and sting. Ants are more of a symptom that there is woodwork that is not completely fresh, because they need cracks to get in. Then there are the joints between the garden tiles, of course. Couldn’t we avoid ant poison? Try ground cinnamon, they hate it.
In addition, there are of course ticks, which we don’t have to hate, we just have to make sure they don’t crawl around on us and bite into us. A walk through the tall grass or in the forest, and you have to check yourself when you get home. They haven’t had time to burrow into the skin, so remove them with a pair of tweezers. There are also those who say that you can put a lump of butter so that they can’t breathe, because they have to breathe. Then they come out and gasp for air.
Then there are rats. It is said that inside the cities we are never more than 10 meters from a rat. Maybe 30, if you live on the 5th floor. They live in the sewage system. If we see them in the backyard, it is a system of leaks somewhere in the system, or that you have not been careful with your waste. If you feed birds, make sure that the pigeons or ducks eat them, because otherwise we will have rats. If you use feeding boards for the sparrow, make sure not to overfeed, because rats can climb up the pole. The farmers have the problem that they go for animal feed, so they have to make sure they have it in containers with lids. And then they always have at least one farm cat. The cat kills the baby rats before they grow up, but they don’t bother to eat them. Then of course there is the Swedish farm dog or the small terrier species. The Swedish farm dogs are known to be lightning fast at rats. The farmers also have to make sure that their barn floors are not cracked.
People hate bats because they have read too many comic books. If you have one of them inside, you should not touch it with your hands, because it may be flying around with rabies. Otherwise, bats are useful and funny animals. Try to think of how many annoying mosquitoes bats can eat on a warm summer evening. In certain places in the world where there are natural caves, there is a very specific time when the last ray of sunlight hits the hole, so a million bats fly out of the hole, because now is the feeding time. And in countries with malaria mosquitoes, people should be extremely grateful for them.
Once, when I was a little drunk and cycling home from a trip to the city to my then home near the lakes = the old motes of the fortifications of Copenhagen, the following happened. Bats live in the chestnut trees along the lake. As you know, they are well equipped with sonar radar, so I have not heard of anyone colliding with a bat. But I did that night, because suddenly FLAPS! then I got one of them in the head. Of course it flew away, frightened. So I just think it had been to a pub like me. It had had too many fermented berries or eaten too many insects that had eaten fermented berries. It was simply drunk - I think. Because animals also go to pubs in late summer, when berries and fruits make alcohol. Remember the pig in Emil from Lönneberg. And Tycho Brage’s pet moose.
Then of course there are spiders. How many people in this room know someone who has been bitten by a spider? No, we are not on their menu. I simply don’t know why so many girls and women go EEYUW-a-spider!!-fashion if one crawls across the floor. OK, hunting spiders or house spiders can get quite big. But think of it like the bats: their menu consists of animals that you would rather not have. You should actually put them on the payroll. And then look at that insanely beautiful spider web on an early morning with dew. And in the middle there might be a big cross spider, so stop and look at it. It’s actually quite beautiful. But don’t pet it, because it can actually sting. It should be something like a bee sting, so you’re sure to survive. But wasn’t it your own fault?
Of course this is me from Denmark talking here. We have the cross spider that can give a bite like a wasp. But you really have to ask for it. I do understand, that there are very poisonous spiders out there like the black widow to be cautious about.
Mosquitoes are a real nuisance. Some say it’s your blood type, because some people never get stung and others always get stung. That doesn’t seem very likely, because how could they smell your blood type? Another, better explanation is that you suffer from a vitamin B deficiency, and mosquitoes are attracted to that smell. It’s definitely worth a try. In any case, make sure you get as much vitamin B as you need. Include whole grains, eggs, beans, citrus fruits, avocados, meat in general, and especially liver from both livestock, game, and fish on your menu.
Mosquito spray contains everything we’d rather not know. There’s no need for all that harmful chemistry. So here’s the recipe for homemade mosquito spray:
Anti-mosquito spray
In a spray bottle, pour:
1 teaspoon cinnamon oil - available in health food stores - price approx. 80 kr.
1 teaspoon vanilla extract - common in supermarkets - price approx. 25 kr.
1 tbsp vodka - from 70 kr. - NB! vanilla extract also contains alcohol
Fill with clean water, preferably distilled, but the supplier of the recipe, who calls himself on YouTube Zen Garden Oasis, comes from a place where city water contains chlorine and fluoride, Danish tap water does not.
Store in the refrigerator.
Mr. Zen Garden also has a recipe for a mosquito trap. Mosquitoes are attracted to the CO2 that surrounds you through exhalation and sweat. By simulating this smell, you can attract large numbers of mosquitoes and with this mosquito trap you block their ability to reproduce themselves. This must be done at the beginning of the season to work optimally, and somewhere between 4-10 of these traps do the job. You can buy these kinds of traps, but they are at prices that are ridiculous when you can make them yourself.
Banana flies are also annoying. But they are also a symptom pest that tells you that you have not taken care of their food source. The recipe for getting rid of them is of course to get rid of banana peels, orange peels, everything that has to do with fruit. However, there is also a recipe for killing those that have already arrived. You cut a plastic bottle in half, remove the cork, turn the top over and stick it into the bottom. Then you take water + a dash of vinegar + a few drops of dishwashing liquid and pour in so that they reach just above the inverted bottle hole. The flies are attracted by the vinegar vapors and crawl into the hole. When they try to suck the water, they are caught by the sulfur, which dissolves the surface tension in the water, which they can walk on, after which they sink to the bottom. A single filling can easily contain 50 flies if you shake it a little. So it works.
In addition, there are a number of animals that people love to hate, corvids for example, which are crows, rooks, allicks and ravens - ravens are very rare in Denmark. People think they are aggressive. How about focusing on how intelligent they are. It is actually possible to become good friends with them if you feed them and they remember you. Don’t insult them, because they remember that too. They can recognize your facial features.
Seagulls are worse. They have become seriously aggressive with the new hipster outdoor seating in restaurants and cafes that are placed close to the sea. They simply jump onto your plate if you turn your back. Here’s another angle on seagulls. All that talk about paleo food is largely an artificial dimension. Stone Age people ate … boiled seagulls.
Wolves are hated and feared by humans. There are horror stories of the wolf as a bloodthirsty beast that are wildly exaggerated and completely out of proportion. Attacks by wolves on humans are extremely rare, as it is a shy animal. It avoids humans. The hatred is because the wolf is an expert hunter who is a highly intelligent competitor to humans. And yes, it also hunts the farmer’s sheep if it can get away with it, but the reality is, as usual, different from the horror story.
The wolf was extinct in Denmark until specimens began to migrate up from Germany. They have settled in North Jutland in areas with large forests and open spaces such as Store Vildmose. The problem with Denmark and this type of animal is that they require large, continuous areas to exist. In the same areas of Jutland, they have an overpopulation of red deer/elk, which due to the overpopulation become pests, and patrols were deployed for ‘pest control’. Here you would think that the natural enemy of large animals, the wolf, could do its job, but since the number of wolves is not large enough for them to create packs suitable for hunting large animals, they only hunt smaller animals outside the pack. The day the population becomes large enough to form packs, North Jutland has a problem, because then they will hunt outside the limited area, and then the farmers will be really scared.
Here is an interesting story from the USA, Yellowstone National Park. In 1930, the wolwes had been exterminated in the area. They had been systematically shot as a pest. In the period from 1930 to 1990, something resembling a local environmental disaster was observed. Tree growth was dying out, wetlands were disappearing, why? The elk no longer had natural enemies, so the herd grew out of eco-balanced size and they ate all the leaves and siblings of young trees. They no longer had to move. When district authorities decided to bring 14 Canadian wolves to the area, something strange happened. They had been selected specifically because their natural food was deer/elk, and because as individuals they had not shown any problems with humans. The locals were of course skeptical and spread all sorts of horror stories according to wolf mythology.
What happened was that the population of red deer was regulated.
Tree growth was regulated and returned to pre-1930 levels.
With the tree growth, the beavers returned, creating new wetlands.
With the new wetlands, a multitude of birds and other animals returned.
It all created a tourist industry in the area.
It was estimated that 14 wolves introduced in 1990 over a 30-year period generated a combined revenue of $80 billion for the state! That’s sobering.