Photo by Dennis Ray/Wikipedia Commons |
It’s autumn in the Ozarks. Know how I know? There are horse flies everywhere, and they bite!
Mom says they’re as big as B-12 bombers but I don’t know what that is. What I do know is that they’re big enough to make us goats race around like banshees when they land on our butts. And they do that all the time.
Mom has been very busy finishing a book about us goats (it’s called Get Your Goat). She hogs the computer but we finally got online last night. Uzzi said we should look up horse flies at Wikipedia, so we did. Wikipedia’s the place to learn lots of things.
Uzzi tapped in the Web address, then we read about tabanids (those are flies that drink our blood). When we read what it said, our hair stood on end!
Imagine this: “Unlike insects which surreptitiously puncture the skin with needle-like organs, horse flies have mandibles like tiny serrated scimitars, which they use to rip and/or slice flesh apart. This causes the blood to seep out as the horsefly licks it up. They may even carve a chunk completely out of the victim, to be digested at leisure.”
Carved up chunks of Martok meat! No wonder it hurts so much. Uzzi and I looked at each other and nodded; we’ll be glad to see fly time end.
But autumn is a good time too. All of my Boer girlfriends are in heat! They line up by my buck run and pose and prance and purr because they want me to help them make babies.
But mean old Mom and Dad say “no”, ‘cause they don’t want us to have a lot of kids. I have to wait until December to breed Bon Bon! Uzzi thinks it’s funny but I don’t think it’s fair.
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