The lovely ladybird, I mentioned a while ago, left us. She was probably fed up with serving as our cleaning lady. I tried to persuade her to stay. She could even call herself a squatter to make it sound more impressive, she would look independent that way. Unfortunately for us, she had made up her mind and left.
Another very interesting and helpful animal, but hardly as elegant as a ladybird, is of course the dog. And apart from the specially trained dogs, like drug or bomb detection dogs, search and rescue dogs and assistance dogs for disabled people, I heard about fireworks detection dogs on the news. This was to keep stadiums free of fireworks during a soccer game, because that was thrown on the field by hooligans.
I am not someone who likes dog, but I think very highly of them in the mentioned circumstances. Apart from the dogs trained to detect fireworks, to be honest. It does not sound as glorious as finding drugs, explosives or people that need rescuing. Are the firework detection dogs the one’s in class that failed to score A-levels, but useful enough to carry out this task?
Perhaps I shouldn’t be that hard on the fireworks dog. I cannot start to imagine what the fun of throwing fireworks at a soccer team during the game might be, and being one of the sniffers checking up on potential hooligans must be though.
Apart from being sad for loosing the ladybird as my companion, the inevitable became reality: bugs have found the Verbena plant. So wouldn’t it be great to invent a sniffer dog that comes to our house and detects bugs in my herbal plants? A dog that is at the same time trained to let out a special bug bark, that makes them all call out for their mommies and run for shelter.
If you enjoyed this story, you might also like to read: Birds, bees and mice or In shining armor.
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This post is also available in: Dutch