Animals

The other day while sitting outside we heard a sneeze from the grass, and Mika was just stopped in time from pouncing on a very unwell looking hedgehog. It seemed like it had been in an argument with a lawnmower, resulting in the loss of a large chunk of the top of its head – though not too recently, as it seemed to be healing, and there was no infection. After a lot of umming and aahing we decided to give it some cat food, though it looked so unwell we thought it might not even eat. To our surprise, it tucked into the cat food, polished it off and went about its business.

The twist came today, when we told our gardener* about it. He lives about a quarter of a mile away across the fields, and it turns out they’d found this same hedgehog a couple of weeks ago, with the wound fresher and badly infected. It was treated with “some of that stuff you put on sheep when they’ve got maggits” and off it went.

Notice that the events in this exciting story occur out of order to how they actually happened in the calendar, i.e. you don’t find out about the hedgehog’s original treatment until later. This confirms my suspicion that Quentin Tarantino is secretly scripting my life, and I’m only stating this here to deflect any blame in the event that I accidentally shoot someone when my toast pops out of the toaster tomorrow morning.

*we don’t have “a gardener” the way the Queen might – in fact I just neglected our oversized lawns and orchard to such an extent that we had to get a pro in to rescue the situation.

Blossom escaped yesterday. Blossom is the lamb we took in at a couple of weeks old, in need of bottle-feeding and twice-daily injections to her leg. She quickly learnt to kick a football and developed a love of (a) human company, and (b) shitting on the dog’s bed if we ever accidentally left the door open. After a couple of months, leg fully recovered, she went back to the farm to rejoin the flock, where it quickly became apparent that she was unable to reintegrate into sheep society, so she returned to us as a pet lamb.

We have her nicely fenced in to her own section of the orchard, but during the day she normally comes out of there and roams the garden wreaking havoc on plants and trees, while mostly ignoring the grass we were hoping she’d like to mow for us. Yesterday she got bored of that, and since she’d already knocked over all the wheelbarrows and garden chairs, there was nothing left to do but batter down the gate and make good her escape.

The problem is that Blossom is just a regular common and garden lamb, while her nearest neighbours are very valuable and expensive pedigree sheep. Needless to say, the latter are subject to better disease control and testing than poor Blossom, who is therefore not allowed to go anywhere near her overprivileged cousins.

It goes without saying then, that despite having previously made it clear that she had no interest whatsoever in other sheep, she made a beeline for these posh relatives. It’s there she was discovered by the farmer, who was naturally not happy about the situation. “Have you got 30 grand?” he wanted to know, anticipating the plague and pestilence Blossom had brought to his prize flock. No. Not even in Monopoly money.

So today we’re moving Blossom’s electric fence to give her a larger range, and she’ll be staying within it so she can’t break down any more gates. The chicken’s house will fall within this new enclosure, so hopefully they’ll be contained as well and we’ll be able to roam the rest of the garden with at least a little less fear of stepping in something unpleasant.