Skip to main content

Look Away Now

Dougal the dog was entertaining himself in the garden a couple of days ago. As I watched from the porch he stopped, picked up something grey, furry and dead and carried it around for a few seconds. Then he dropped it and went to sniff a bush.

I had a look and as expected found the stiffening corpse of another rodent foolish enough to cross paths with Dougal, scourge of rats.

I had always been under the impression that rats were intelligent creatures, but evidently this one hadn't been paying attention at rat school and was not simply passing through but had chosen to build its nest in the garden.

I only discovered this the next day when Dougal, ably assisted by the lovely Bella, started collecting up the mini-rats and dropping them in the grass - five in total. After some tidying up work with the shovel and a plastic bag, it was biscuits and sausages all-round.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
my dogs do that too. They kill mice,cats and birds. I feel sorry for the little animals, especially for the birds since the dogs do it just for fun to kill. I've seen dogs in Greece do this as well, so i think that it's not only Albanian dogs...lol
9:16 pm
Anonymous said…
Hi I am a fan of you but please don't show such ugly pictures anymore. It is simply disquisting

By
12:28 pm
olli said…
Sorry you were offended by the picture, but when rats are running across your garden and yard every dead one is a good one.
10:14 pm
Anonymous said…
Go Dougal, go Bella!
5:14 am
Anonymous said…
Yuck!!!!

OK every dead rat is a good rat, but descriptive words would have been enough, the zooming in on the carnage is a bit much...
5:38 am
Selfmaderadio said…
but,

this rat in the picture, is not dead, is it? I guess, you took it in web. It looks to me like a pic taken from a scientific journal :)
5:14 pm
olli said…
Yes it's a lab rat, so I imagine it probably is dead by now.
6:03 pm
Anonymous said…
I don't know that you can kiss your dogs now or let them lick you after this.
9:48 pm
olli said…
Never been that intimate in the first place.
10:33 am
Anonymous said…
ok, coz there are some people who let their dogs indoors. Some even sleep in the same bed with them. Then they get deseases.
11:22 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Miss Globe 2007

On Saturday, we were at the Rogner meeting with an expat friend who was leaving Tirana. It was breakfast time, and as our friend was finishing his tea the breakfast room started to fill up with over-dressed (or under-dressed) young women wearing blue sashes. These were the contestants for the Miss Globe 2007 beauty pageant being held in Tirana tonight at the Palace of Congresses. High heel boots and mini-skirts - or in a couple of cases micro-skirts, or possibly just belts - have never struck me as obvious breakfast attire, but the girls seemed happy enough tottering and wobbling around with their tea and toast. I'm not sure why they were wearing their sashes - perhaps in case they forgot which country they came from. As we were leaving they were boarding a large coach which I had seen a number of times around the city in the last few days for their next trip. I'm not sure how some of them made it up the steps, or how they managed to sit down, but perhaps these are the ki...
11 comments
Read more

Big in Albania

Ask me how much I knew about Albania before coming here and my list would be a short one: Enver Hoxha, bunkers and Sir Norman Wisdom. I have no idea when or how I acquired this extensive body of knowledge, but the association of Norman Wisdom with Albania was by far the most interesting part of it. I remember watching Norman Wisdom's old films on British television. My parents were fans of his wholesome, slapstick comedy, but apparently missed the ideological significance of Pitkin's relationship with Mr Grimsdale. Pitkin, the downtrodden and oppressed representative of the workers, triumphed every time over his capitalist oppressor, Mr Grimsdale - and he got the girl. It took a theorist of Hoxha's insight and profundity to discern this deeper political message. It always seemed tremendously unlikely, yet the story of Sir Norman's fame in Albania has been reported in worthy sources like the BBC , the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph . According to the Guardian, when Wi...
22 comments
Read more

Whimper

And now the end is near and so i face nanananana... Never did like that crappy song. But it's true nevertheless. Tomorrow in the wee hours of the morning we will be heading for the airport for the last time. I suppose it was too much to expect that I could have kept this going while getting ready to leave. So apologies for the lack of postings over the last weeks. This is post number 380 something so I suppose one post every two days is not a bad average. There were probably 380 more in my head or scribbled down on scraps of paper, but many of them are perhaps best left there. I suppose I should be penning - or typing - my final thoughts and reflections on two years in Tirana, but right now I don't have any. Maybe in a month or two though I might come back with something. Thanks to all of you who have read this blog - especially those of you who have become regulars. Thanks also for linking and thanks to all who left comments. As for the other stars of the blog, Bella now has h...
19 comments
Read more