an outing

Ron and Henry check out the transportation

We – or more particularly, the Tribe – have been suffering an infestation of fleas. Despite two doses of Frontline, and copious spraying with cans of expensive Stuff from the vitinery, Henry has been overwhelmed by the little bitey creatures, and so we decided he’d have to see the vet for something stronger.

The surgery is about ten minutes walk away, and Pete and I had a discussion about how best to convey Henry – initially, Pete wanted to walk him, but he’s a heavy beast (Henry, that is – those who have met Pete will know he is but a slip of a thing :), and I didn’t think he’d like being carried that far innabox. Then Pete decided that his bike trailer would be just the thing, but in the end we took the car. Which took about ten minutes, due to the Machiavellian nature of the one-way system round here, which is designed to stop boy racers steaming through the grid of terraced streets. It works very well, but it makes a short journey much longer in a car.

Henry was admired and weighed (5 kgs!), and pronounced en-flea’d. Sarah the vet said we would need to do the rest, and she would need to see them to have them weighed. Our hearts sank – catching the other four was likely to be a non-trivial task. I assured her that we had weights for the spotty boys from last November, and given that they are alpha male Bengals, we could be quite sure they weighed over 4kgs, thank you very much. But Lilith and Ron were a different matter – I could be positive Lily was under 4kgs, and thought Ron was, but wasn’t sure, so they had to go in.

And so Pete came home, fetched out a stack of bungees, and set to to see how to secure the bike basket in the trailer. We bribed Ron and Lily in with cold roast chickie!, a trick that never fails, and off they went on a nice trip out – he left the cover off the trailer so they could see where they were going, and they seem completely untraumatised by their experience.

All five have now been dosed with Advocate, and the house vacuumed and sprayed once more – let us hope we shall shortly be free of bloody fleas.

** note for self: Iggy and Mustrum 5.5kgs, Lilith 3.8kgs, Ron 4.6kgs (which surprised me), Henry 5kgs.