Hedgehog in our garden making its nest

It lives under the shed in our garden and yesterday we watched it spend ages going out to get leaves for its nest. We bought it some hay and left it by its door today so hopefully it will enjoy that. Might start leaving some food for it. Might even give it a name, not sure if it's a boy or girl though. Here is a short clip of it collecting nest material.

The hedgehog that lives in our garden

I'm glad I'm vegetarian

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020151/Abattoir-staffs-shocking-animal-cruelty-filmed-WONT-prosecuted.html

I don't normally write or talk about my beliefs because I don't see the point, you can't change people. Well, not usually anyway. So this is not why I am posting it but I was so angry I just wanted to get it off my chest.

WARNING: The above link is from an article that is not nice to read or see because it is about the nasty truth about abattoirs. The headline of the article is Revealed: Shocking cruelty at massive abattoir... but those responsible WON'T be prosecuted.

To me, the article isn't even shocking because I'm aware of what happens at slaughterhouses, but it never fails to sicken me. You must have to be a certain kind of evil sadistic person to work in an abattoir and I really don't care who disagrees with me. I still can't believe it is allowed, this awful, inhumane treatment of animals. They are tortured and mocked and see their friends die in front of them and they know what is coming. Those people at the very least should be sacked. Urgh people disgust me.

There was another story recently that has even put me off chocolate and I didn't think anything could do that! It was a story about the male little baby calfs being shot at the milk producers for Dairy Milk bars because they are 'of no use.' I knew that in meat production the baby male livestock are often killed soon after birth because they don't fatten up like the females. I hadn't twigged that they might do the same at dairy farms :-(

Walk in the woods and out stumbles a deer!

Cupcakes

Birthday Cake

Another experiment with decorating cakes - chocolate shavings with mocha butter icing this time.

Christmas 2010

Christmas was a quiet one this year with just the two of us, plus six small furry animals (Horace, Jazz, Mr Tumnus, Aslan, Totoro, Muta). Despite a few nice little things happpening here and there it's been a rubbish year again and a tiny part of me felt like the Grinch. However, this thought only disturbed me for a short while as I really do love Christmas and was determined to enjoy it, so I did! We really enjoyed our Christmas and had all the traditional things that we like - roasting chestnuts, decorating a tree, making a vegetarian roast dinner (see picture, it was extremely tasty and far better than eating dead animal) and there was even some left over snow. It snowed heavily just before Christmas so even though it did not snow on Christmas day, happily there was still a white covering outside. I watched Christmas films all day, ate waaaay too much food and played on a new Wii game called Raving Rabbids which is brilliant!!!

The best Christmas present of all has to be that while we have sadly lost two of our dearest gerbil friends this year, Hermes (Horace's brother) and baby Bumblebee (Jazz's sister), Horace survived his operation and is now in good spirits and fully healed. He enjoyed his Christmas instead of suffering from a nasty scent gland tumour he had, as we had it removed for him just before Christmas and he made an immediate recovery. See a very happy Horace in the picture above. Merry Christmas Horace!