Am I aware ? Well several forced viewings of "The Animals Film" as a 6th former left me in no doubt. In unrelated news, todays dinner is ribeye steak, gastro chips, onion rings egg and beans with a drop of Malbec.
My Dad grew up (not in the UK) making damn sure he never farmed. He actually did quite well renting out farming machinery.
Seeing my Grandad remove a chickens head on the gatepost left me in no doubts where chicken comes from ...
(A friend of mine "moved to the country" to have his 4 kids ... last time we stayed, the 14 year old girl was explaining how she had to wring a chickens neck after her dad "made a right horlicks of it" ....)
You don't need to buy a Honda mower for £400. You can get a perfectly adequate Mountfield mower for far less than half of that - look out for offers at Screwfix etc. Just make sure it's got a Briggs and Stratton engine - they last for ever even if you neglect them mercilessly.
If you're not too fussy, you can pick up a reasonable petrol mower at a car boot sale, or even at a tip shop - my local tip sells them. I paid £40 for a Mountfield mower with a B&S engine at a car boot sale about 10 years ago, and it's still going strong.
Was that something that 'most people' went into then, for him to make such a statement?
Yeah, the capital cost of some of this stuff is very high and if you only need to use it a couple of times a year and have it take up valuable space in between, renting makes sense.
No, I had no doubt that you knew where such things come from, I just wondered if you thought anything about the process. You have already answered that (thanks).
This is the thing ... I'm not saying that people (including children) can be de-sensitise to such things and for those people that choose to eat meat it's just as well there are such people out there to do that bit for them.
For me it's the dichotomy / disconnection for say caring for a horse or pet dog or even livestock (that you are only going to kill anyway)?
What is it that allows someone to jump in and stop someone being cruel to a cat, dog, donkey or horse but allows them to be cruel to a sow, make chick, dairy cow or male dairy calf (ignoring pate on ducks and geese etc).
I 'get' *that* they differentiate on the grounds of 'livestock', but not how they can, other than some form of conditioning?
Give a child an apple and a chicken and it would typically play / interact with the chicken and eat the apple. Give a lion cub the same and it would do the opposite.
Depends on the quality of the battery and charger, how many charge / discharged cycles it has been though and to what depth for each, how the battery has been stored and the load it was put to when in use.
Yup IME even my petrol mowers[1] don't work well on wet grass - and will struggle with the first cut of the season if its long and wet. Collection and clogging being the normal problem.
About the only mowers I have heard good results for on collection of wet grass are Contax ride ons with the rotary brush sweeper collector.
[1] Old manual 3.5hp 14" petrol Hayter, and 13.5HP 36" ride on.
Well you could cut'n'drop, so grass all over the place, but no collection, or mulch. Mulching is ok in theory, but in practice means cutting several times a week in the peak growing season, and you will use more petrol on each cut.
A while back, there was a BBC docu on the Nile, and the camera crew setup some trapcams in Idi Amins old summer house that's been deserted since
1979. Over the 3 days there, nothing ate anything else. There was some footage of a leopard that prowled around a baby warthog that got separated from it's mother but did nothing - just entered and left the room.
As the narrator (rather OTT ...) noted, it was almost like there was a sacred truce in the area.
(For lolz, one of the first cams they setup was mangled by a hyena ...)
I've picked 3 of these up off freecycle in the last year, one B&S sidevalve one with good steel deck I use for picking up hedge cuttings and thus reducing their volume, one nearly new mountfield with OHV engine and plastic deck I cut my lawn with (about 10 minutes every few weeks) the other side valve B&S which had a badly rust perforated steel deck I patched up and modified with a piece of tube to shred a clump of bamboo for a neighbour who had given up taking it to the green waste site during the lockdown and it had all sprouted where it lay.
Yes, I have seen that before (on TV) and mainly with female predators and the young of what would normally be their prey. It's as if the maternal instinct takes over from their prey drive.
Quite, and I think there can be, even between the creatures that some just see as 'meat'. eg, Even animals having the ability to show compassion.
I think they are one of the first animals I *wouldn't* trust my young with. ;-)
These links provided as an indication of the absurdity of BE for mowers. This was the larges battery pack on offer for this sort of thing as of last year.
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"RUN TIME 60 minutes" <=== with the one provided battery 56V 7.5Ah
The battery is 30-40% of the purchase price of the mower. Since my runtime for the yard is 90 minutes, I would need two batteries (so would purchase this one).
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That battery pack is also used in a snow blower. The snow blower takes *two* of those batteries, and will process snow at a depth of 8" to 10" or so. Still not enough for all situations. And if you've ever used a snow blower not matched to the snow depth, you'll know what that means.
When the snow blower uses *four* of those batteries, then only Bill Gates will have one.
There aren't sufficient field reports for those yet, as to failure rates. First we have to find enough rich people to test those for us.
That's more of a power pack than most of them get.
My next door neighbor has a "lesser" BE mower, where the battery pack is inside the housing and cannot be removed. He gets about half the lawn done, before stopping for a recharge. And he finishes the lawn the next day. I don't know where the lawn mower sits while it recharges, somewhere in the back yard, in the rain, or whatever... My neighbor got about four years out of the previous BE mower, and he deserves some sort of award for trying again.
Not a problem for robotic mowers. My sister?s one goes out in the dark sometimes. If so quiet there?s no ?nuisance? noise for neighbours to complain about.
They chop the grass super-fine to mulch it back in, and they cut every day, so in theory you don't get snowdrifts of cut grass that you do with a regular mower. I haven't seen them in action to know how well it works out.
Chap next door bought a Mac Allister from B&Q, corded mains, about £70 3 years ago. Much to my annoyance it cut his fair-sized lawn very well. The grass was about 6" long for the first cut and I though that there was no chance - no problem, more like. What pissed me of was that I used to cut that grass - it's sports pitch seed
- and my Honda, at 3X+ the price, would have need 2 cuts and clearing out a few times. Looks as if your mower might be crap and it could be worth trying a Mac Allister. I reckon that a cordless one won't hack it.
The brand name will be sold off and will start appearing on Chinese made engines.
If there are enough engines already out there third parties start supplying compatible spares - often on these engines you just need a new gasket set, spark plug or petrol hose.
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