Stray Marks

Reader, I have spared you many images. It isn't the subject of my post today that I need to protect you from, but the environment that it prefers.
For now, let's say that's rice.

"This man is fortunate who can get for himself
praise and good will;
very difficult it is when a man lays claim
to what is in another's heart." -- "Sayings of the High One" 8, Poetic Edda

Now that Summer is icummen in, we are plagued with stray animals. The problem with the strays can be laid upon our municipal authorities, upon our culture, upon the animals themselves, and upon our selves.

Oh, I know how it is. Every child wants a young one. Who isn't broken-hearted when he sees a little pupae wriggling in decomposing flesh? The kids all demand that the parents adopt, and all the little pupae are cute, their cute spots on their trunks as they squirm through a wound or the corpse of an opossum on the side of the road. However, adopting a maggot is serious business.

Soon, that cute little larva "dies," and then the children lose interest. If only it were true. Instead, Wiggy, your pet maggot, has just gone into metamorphose, and it will come out a fly, a fly that you do not want to feed and train. Just thirty-six hours after emerging, the no-longer-cute pets are breeding. This is why we have such strays clouding the skies.

It is important to spay or neuter your housefly as soon as it emerges from its chrysalis, if you want to control the population.