An quote from Charles Dickens in the 1938 Weekend Book – “Cows are my passion”.
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Edwin Moo’d
Tag: Animals
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First Drown your Kitten, 1935
Today – some rather upsetting advice from the 1935 Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts on how to kill unwanted kittens. Your choices are either to drown them in a bucket, or by administering chloroform onto their little kitten faces. Chloroform, you say…….hmmm, perhaps a bit of the old Owbridge’s Lung Tonic might do the trick.
From the matter-of-fact way this is described, it seems to be that as far as they were concerned this was the humane thing to do. One of the cats we had when I was a child was rescued by a family friend who discovered a man with a bag of kittens, preparing to drown them in a river. I bet (hope!) there’s not too much cat-drowning happening now.
“A healthy cat can bring up four kittens, but unless you are deliberately breeding cats, you will only want to keep one or two.”
Of course, if a cat accidentally nearly drowns itself, this is the thing to do. You can swing a cat in here apparently.
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An Absurdity of Plurals, 1938
Who came up with the pluralisations of animals? When and, also, why? They are gloriously poetic but useless – you can hardly use most of them in real life without looking like a self-satisfaction of tossers.
And whoever invented “A Singular of Boars” is just taking the piss.
