Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
My friend lives on seven acres. She has a wonderful native garden, including a number of rare species that she has nurtured, and it is alive with birds. She lives alone, survives on her slender savings, is rather frail and over 50, and her only company most days is her two dogs, Max and Ida. They are beautifully trained. Max is a Springer, lively, intelligent and imaginative, given to moods and attention-seeking now and then. Ida is his opposite. She is a pedigree labrador - not that my friend cares about pedigrees to speak of, she just loves fine creatures. Ida is the fittest, most active labrador I have ever seen. She and Max spend hours every day running round the property, chasing each other, playing all sorts of games, which they invent for themselves. Where Max is charming but moody, fawning or grumpy, Ida is as placid as you could imagine. She is phenomenally active for a Labrador, with that subtle rippling of muscles under her soft black coat that only athletes have, but her jaunts with Max aside, she asks nothing more than to be by your side. She adores humans, is always the first to hear my car and race up to say hello to me. Last winter I had to mend the rainwater tank up on the hill. It was a bitterly cold day, icy, hailing from time to time. Max has sense enough to sulk in his kennel, or hang around outside the door asking to be let in near the heater. Not Ida: she came with me and sat, shivering in the hail, keeping me company until the job was done.
Living on the block next door is a very different sort of person. He runs some stock: cattle mostly, a few other creatures. He's not a farmer, of course, he just plays at it. The block is eaten bare because he over-stocks it. Every summer we have to listen to his cows bellowing for food and water, in winter there is no shelter for them because he has barely a tree on the whole 20 acres, and those he does have are that noxious feral import, Radiata Pine. Where my friend build a new fence around the central three acres of her block so as to keep the dogs from roaming, his cattle regularly break out, and it is not at all uncommon to have them create havoc in my friend's garden.
He does not speak with any of the neighbours, bar his son, who is one block further down, and just like him. He has truckloads of organic factory waste delivered now and then. Allegedly it's "fertiliser", but if the wind is wrong the stench is appalling. (If he is so interested in fertiliser and growing things, why is his block cropped bare and devoid of vegetation?) He doesn't care. He dumps his rubbish in a bulldozed hole, from where it blows all over the countryside. Picking up after him is a regular and unpleasant duty. When one of his sheep or cattle dies (which is not infrequent, as he does not give them proper shelter or look after them), he just leaves it to rot. And when he butchers an animal for the table, he takes the best cuts and leaves that carcass to rot also.
He has guns, of course, several legal licensed ones, plus at least one illegal semi-automatic. I've never seen it but you can hear the rapid fire shots from time to time; far too close together to be a legal weapon.
A couple of weeks ago he butchered an animal and, as ever, left the carcass and all the offal outside to rot. Now what dog, no matter how well-trained, could resist that? Ida, magnificent athlete that she is, can jump any fence less than twice her height, and did so.
So he shot her. No warning, no phone call "can you please control your dog", he pulled out one of his several guns and shot this beautiful, gentle creature in cold blood. (I actually suspect that he left the offal out deliberately in the hope of arranging just this circumstance, but have no way of proving it, of course.) Now the law restricts the use and ownership of guns here in Australia. According to the gun-lovers, the restrictions are very strict and in fact unreasonable. Unfortunately, there are many, many loopholes in them. The particular loophole that is relevant here is the one that says you may shoot any animal if you are farming and you are defending your stock. That particular law meant that, although no-one had the slightest doubt about his selfish, evil action, he could not be prosecuted for it.
Oh yes, the police were called, but in the end they had to admit that there was nothing they could do. They inspected his gun licenses and his guns but (surprise, surprise) the illegal semi-automatic was nowhere to be found. He himself, not realising that he had an iron-clad legal defence already, was foolish enough to flat-out deny that he had shot poor Ida, or indeed anything. I should imagine that it wouldn't have been too difficult for forensic people to find evidence of the shotgun blast in question, but what point? Even with absolute proof, all he had to do was swear on oath that he was defending his cattle from attack.
In the end, the police told him (and his son, who they also interviewed) that, this being a residential neighbourhood, shooting in the area was not permitted, and that if there were any more reports of shooting there could be serious consequences. In reality, while shooting in residential areas is indeed illegal, the population density here is such that it is unlikely that a charge would stand up before a magistrate.
He has had an unfriendly interview with the police to endure and (one hopes) something of a fright.
Ida crawled home in terrible pain and the vet does not expect that she will ever fully recover the use of one of her legs. She is still the same placid, gentle, loyal creature, but it is pitiful to see this once-magnificent athlete reduced to hobbling. The expense of the surgery to remove bone shotgun pellets and fragments from her body was significant, of course.
And my friend is still living next door to a demonstrably unbalanced man with a collection of deadly firearms.
Living on the block next door is a very different sort of person. He runs some stock: cattle mostly, a few other creatures. He's not a farmer, of course, he just plays at it. The block is eaten bare because he over-stocks it. Every summer we have to listen to his cows bellowing for food and water, in winter there is no shelter for them because he has barely a tree on the whole 20 acres, and those he does have are that noxious feral import, Radiata Pine. Where my friend build a new fence around the central three acres of her block so as to keep the dogs from roaming, his cattle regularly break out, and it is not at all uncommon to have them create havoc in my friend's garden.
He does not speak with any of the neighbours, bar his son, who is one block further down, and just like him. He has truckloads of organic factory waste delivered now and then. Allegedly it's "fertiliser", but if the wind is wrong the stench is appalling. (If he is so interested in fertiliser and growing things, why is his block cropped bare and devoid of vegetation?) He doesn't care. He dumps his rubbish in a bulldozed hole, from where it blows all over the countryside. Picking up after him is a regular and unpleasant duty. When one of his sheep or cattle dies (which is not infrequent, as he does not give them proper shelter or look after them), he just leaves it to rot. And when he butchers an animal for the table, he takes the best cuts and leaves that carcass to rot also.
He has guns, of course, several legal licensed ones, plus at least one illegal semi-automatic. I've never seen it but you can hear the rapid fire shots from time to time; far too close together to be a legal weapon.
A couple of weeks ago he butchered an animal and, as ever, left the carcass and all the offal outside to rot. Now what dog, no matter how well-trained, could resist that? Ida, magnificent athlete that she is, can jump any fence less than twice her height, and did so.
So he shot her. No warning, no phone call "can you please control your dog", he pulled out one of his several guns and shot this beautiful, gentle creature in cold blood. (I actually suspect that he left the offal out deliberately in the hope of arranging just this circumstance, but have no way of proving it, of course.) Now the law restricts the use and ownership of guns here in Australia. According to the gun-lovers, the restrictions are very strict and in fact unreasonable. Unfortunately, there are many, many loopholes in them. The particular loophole that is relevant here is the one that says you may shoot any animal if you are farming and you are defending your stock. That particular law meant that, although no-one had the slightest doubt about his selfish, evil action, he could not be prosecuted for it.
Oh yes, the police were called, but in the end they had to admit that there was nothing they could do. They inspected his gun licenses and his guns but (surprise, surprise) the illegal semi-automatic was nowhere to be found. He himself, not realising that he had an iron-clad legal defence already, was foolish enough to flat-out deny that he had shot poor Ida, or indeed anything. I should imagine that it wouldn't have been too difficult for forensic people to find evidence of the shotgun blast in question, but what point? Even with absolute proof, all he had to do was swear on oath that he was defending his cattle from attack.
In the end, the police told him (and his son, who they also interviewed) that, this being a residential neighbourhood, shooting in the area was not permitted, and that if there were any more reports of shooting there could be serious consequences. In reality, while shooting in residential areas is indeed illegal, the population density here is such that it is unlikely that a charge would stand up before a magistrate.
He has had an unfriendly interview with the police to endure and (one hopes) something of a fright.
Ida crawled home in terrible pain and the vet does not expect that she will ever fully recover the use of one of her legs. She is still the same placid, gentle, loyal creature, but it is pitiful to see this once-magnificent athlete reduced to hobbling. The expense of the surgery to remove bone shotgun pellets and fragments from her body was significant, of course.
And my friend is still living next door to a demonstrably unbalanced man with a collection of deadly firearms.