Oh, Australia, you try and you try... more imported species issues

Every time the Aussies try to do something about a troublesome species, it backfires on them, to the point of comedy it seems. I dunno, maybe they don’t actually do anything worse than other countries, but they just get beat up more by the media.

Here’s an AP story about the latest fiasco: Removing cats to protect birds backfires on island.

Further down…

I can’t wait to find out what the lead bullets, poison pellets, and poison gasses will do next.

Well, it seems to me that the obvious choice would be to release some velociraptors to take care of the rabbits.

So Australia is the old lady who swallowed a fly. I see.

Obviously the birds are quite hardy so the poisons and bullets will have no effect on them. It was only the pesky cats eating them and rabbits eating all the food that was getting in the way of their survival. Surely they will be able to hold on another year without a decent food source until the rabbits can be removed.

Definitely. But keep a few T-Rexes on hand just in case that goes south.

Good thinking. We’ll keep that tentative appointment with Apophis on the calendar iff’n the T-Rex’s get uppity.

I don’t. Why did she swallow a fly?

I don’t know why, but she swallowed a spider to eat the fly, and a bird to eat the spider, and a snake to eat the bird, and so on.

I thought it was a cat to eat the bird?

Fly>Spider>Bird>Cat>Dog>Goat>Cow>Horse (she died, of course!)

Most accurate and succinct description ever.

That story screwed me up when I was a kid! I first heard it in 1st grade and I still don’t like it.

The old woman is obviously mentally ill, seeing as how she keeps swallowing animals, and no one is helping her.

And when she died (of course!?), it is said with such callousness as if it’s a throwaway thought. Every life is important and should be cherished and just saying “of course” like it’s something that doesn’t matter is not how life should be viewed. This old woman who swallowed a fly, was someone’s daughter at one time, possible a sister and mother. The fact that no one thought she was important enough to merit a bit more than an ‘‘of course’’ is a scary thought to a child. What if I ended up like that?

Old ladies die. This is truth. I have seen it. Dead old ladies uncounted may be found in my lineage.

One died when she tripped over her cat.

If she’d had a rabbit she might have lived.

What always confuses me is why she keeps eating herbivores to deal with the problem. Shouldn’t someone have suggested that she swallow a Nile Crocodile instead?

For ever?

There’s some kind of joke in there that should end with the punchline, “Yes, but the rabbit died.”

Not exactly. More like we are the doctor who extracted the spider, resulting in the old lady dying from the fly.

I would have said more like the doctor who inserted a fly first because it should solve a few problem the old bat had with not cleaning her teeth and then the problems started …

Cane toads anyone? Try finding something to swallow after consuming that thing.

There can be only one.

Ah, see…it made me uneasy, too, but for entirely different reasons.

I kept imagining the logistics of actually swallowing those animals. The gaping maw, the scraping of the tonsils as limbs passed, the bulging of the esophagus and the distention of the stomach… By the time we got to the goat, I was kind of faint with panic.

Talk about threads that head off in unexpected directions…