Saturday, March 7, 2009

Flies and dog food

I noticed something important today, but to make sense of it, you'd need a bit of context.

Living in Auckland on a modest property that has been sub-divided, we do not have a large garden. It's big enough for most things, but a paddock it isn't. One of the compromises we have had to make is the need to share the garden with our dog, who needs somewhere to poo.

Now we could just leave it there and hope the rain sorts it out, but that approach has not been a very successful one. After a few weeks, we were effectively unable to walk on the lawn and had to pick our way to the car through the doggy doos.

Vinyl disposable gloves were bought and a new family chore came into being: poo picker up-er. My turn is on Saturdays.

So today I was out in the garden picking up poo and putting it in a plastic bag, which then goes into the rubbish. You can't flush them. They float. They float very well. Too well to flush.

In the course of picking up all the poos since Wednesday, I noticed that amid the "crop", exactly one lot of poo had very tiny maggots crawling all over it. Hundreds of them. All the rest were completely free of these tiny white maggots. What was it about this single pile of poop that was so obviously life-sustaining and attractive to Mum and Dad Fly?

Discussing it with my eldest daughter, we worked out the poo in question was almost certainly the product of a breakfast meal of the free sample of "Purina Beneful" I had obtained via a TV / Txt / www / 'drive 10km to Post Office at lunch time for unknown package' product promotion.

This meal was the only exception to our dog's usual diet of various flavours of "Pedigree" (actually fairly tasty!) dog biscuits. I've only tried a couple.

Thinking about this, flies are a constant problem around the house. There always seems to be one sitting quietly somewhere on a wall, lamp, pot plant or my cheese sandwich. I'd prefer to have as few of them as possible and don't see myself knowingly providing a nursery for thousands of them.

I'm glad I have worked out now, rather than later, that some dog foods provide an excellent medium for enabling thousands of flies to be born, grow and reach their full potential.

Not at my house. No more Beneful here.

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