Overheard this brief conversation in the grounds of a National Trust house today:
"Eurgh! Get them down! They'll be all covered in rat dust!"
Said a mother, walking round a nature trail, in six inch heels, designer jeans and a cropped linen jacket, as she watched her sons climb onto a bale of straw.
What is rat dust? Toxic dander shed by rodents? Poisonous rat hairs just waiting to pierce their soft, young flesh and rot it from the inside out? What films has she been watching? What possible harm does she think playing in a field will do to her two little boys?And what if a passing rat did sniff around the same corner of rural England yesterday, a little bit of dirt and 'rat dust' is not normally harmful - and there are probably more rats per square inch of her urban home (it must have been urban - no-one born and bred in the country would wear those clothes to go for a walk, or worry about dirt and boys, or teeter pathetically at the edge of the path as though the long grass in the field would swallow her up if she ventured across it).
I wanted to creep up to those boys, find them a muddy puddle, collect leaves and feathers, get gloriously filthy and encourage them to jump in the moat - but the last might actually have held a genuinely dangerous ratty problem - Weil's disease. So instead, I watched my own children as they found dead rabbits, petted horses, watched dragonflies, climbed on the straw bales and ran through the long grass.
But, even I have to admit that briefly, my heart was in my mouth as Littlest danced too near to the moat.
"Eurgh! Get them down! They'll be all covered in rat dust!"
Said a mother, walking round a nature trail, in six inch heels, designer jeans and a cropped linen jacket, as she watched her sons climb onto a bale of straw.
What is rat dust? Toxic dander shed by rodents? Poisonous rat hairs just waiting to pierce their soft, young flesh and rot it from the inside out? What films has she been watching? What possible harm does she think playing in a field will do to her two little boys?And what if a passing rat did sniff around the same corner of rural England yesterday, a little bit of dirt and 'rat dust' is not normally harmful - and there are probably more rats per square inch of her urban home (it must have been urban - no-one born and bred in the country would wear those clothes to go for a walk, or worry about dirt and boys, or teeter pathetically at the edge of the path as though the long grass in the field would swallow her up if she ventured across it).
I wanted to creep up to those boys, find them a muddy puddle, collect leaves and feathers, get gloriously filthy and encourage them to jump in the moat - but the last might actually have held a genuinely dangerous ratty problem - Weil's disease. So instead, I watched my own children as they found dead rabbits, petted horses, watched dragonflies, climbed on the straw bales and ran through the long grass.
But, even I have to admit that briefly, my heart was in my mouth as Littlest danced too near to the moat.
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