I was very tempted to have titled this post Bouncing In The Borders. Or maybe Leaping in The Lupins, or Jumping On The Jasmine, or Hopping on The Hostas or Boinging in The Buddleia …. I could go on and on.
So I thought the The Times was remarkably restrained with the headline on its report that shire landowners are are increasingly choosing wallabies as pets:
Home-grown wallabies hop in to help gardeners keep their lawns trim
Thousands of miles from their native Outback the marsupials are replacing sheep, horses and geese in scores of country gardens and fields.
All prospective owners need to keep their lawns clipped are half an acre of land, a lot of grass and a large fence.
Oh, is that all. Let’s all get one! They’re pretty expensive though, in addition to the land requirement:
The wallabies cost £150 for a male and £600 to £700 for a female, while the sought-after albino wallabies fetch £1,000 for a female and about £500 for a male
Ah, so it’s posh people buying them then? Thought it might be.
On a waiting list for wallabies is Richard Sheepshanks, who lives at Rendlesham Hall, near Woodbridge, Suffolk. He has 10 acres of land.
“I have a wife, four children under the age of five, and we already have a menagerie with seven dogs, five sheep and four peacocks. I could use sheep to keep down the grass but they are messy and stupid,†he said.
He added: “We have a walled garden separated from the main house which has a 25-foot outer and 10-foot inner wall but it’s a bit wild and the grass needs keeping down.
That’s not a trend, it’s just J Random Posh Bloke who has an unusual pet. Typical Times puff piece. But who cares, wallabies are cute and not at all aggressive either. Just the opposite.
They would be useless as security guards, though. Mr Lay said: “They’d run a mile from a burglar or stranger. They are timid creatures and really harmless but adults will growl if their young are threatened. And they don’t like dogs.â€
(They don’t like pigeons much either.)
It’s almost a shame they’re not aggressive – I do like the ridiculous mental picture of an irate, tweedy, posh bloke threatening to set the attack wallabies loose.
If they were, and wallaby ownership were an actual trend, then given the propensity of suburban landowner wannabes to ape the gentry, it wouldn’t be long before marsupial ownership percolated down the social scale from the shires to the stockbroker belt to aspirational Barratt home land and thence to the outer ring estates. Given the price of wallabies, before long pitbull-wallaby breeding farms’d pop up and we’d see drug dealers pimprolling along with snarling wallabies in studded collars bouncing threateningly by their sides. Or what if they escaped? Imagine hungry, feral wallabies attacking beloved domestic pets before bounding off into the dark.