NEWS/COMMENT: It appears, as reported by the Mirror newspaper, that troops on both sides in the Ukraine war are suffering from pests such as snakes, mice and rats attracted to their trenches where there’s food. The mice are attracted and then the snakes which prey on the mice. There are nine species of snake in Ukraine, I’m told.
Ukraine war zone now over run with millions of mice. Cats have been queuing to be mobilised. ^. .^ One cat with the rank of sergeant even outranked his handler…
Twitter
It appears that the dugouts on both the Russian and Ukrainian side are suffering a dire problem with rodent infestations, which is where the working domestic cat is effective. Cats are being employed, as they were about 10,000 years ago, to keep down rodent populations.
In one report, a Ukrainian military source said: “Numerous images from the front show that the infestation of rodents and snakes has become a serious problem for both the Ukrainian army and Russian troops.”
Mice are particularly common in the trenches. They disturb sleep and bite soldiers. They eat soldiers’ food and chew on their equipment including weapons.
One Ukrainian soldier said on television that “When you wake up, you always catch two or three mice crawling into your sleeping bag. It’s not particularly pleasant when your finger is bitten.”
I feel bad for the soldiers on the Ukrainian side. I also feel bad to a certain extent for the Russian soldiers because they don’t want to be there but they shouldn’t be there either.
What I do feel good about in some respects is that the domestic cat, the stray cat in this instance because their owners have probably been killed by Russian bombs, can now be usefully employed (and cared for) to keep down rodent populations within the trenches. Rodents feed the cats and they help their soldier caretakers. The situation mirrors to a certain extent the very beginnings of cat domestication around 9500 years ago.
While Ukrainians care for the cats the Russians are eating cats and dogs because Putin is not sending food. I actually saw a video taken by Ukrainian soldiers of a dog still on a spit cooking after the Russians ran away.
Russian soldiers are nothing more than fodder.
Yes, and Russian soldiers tend to get drunk and behave appallingly as a consequence or that was the report in the early stages of this war which I think will now go on for up to 10 years. It’ll have to end in a negotiated peace which will be incredibly tough for Ukraine.