Tails From Provence

(For readers with strong stomachs)

I posted a link to my post, Les Mouches Plats, on A Matter of Horse (a small, friendly forum for horse people) and received a couple of comments.  This one, from littlewhitehorse, who has a lovely blog about her work with her Camargue mare Lucie, stood out :

Good idea with the duct tape, will definitely try that. Like the blog post Martine! I remember my first encounter when we came to France was of one of these landing on me, trying to brush it off and swat it and not understanding what this thing was that kept crawling back. This was before I had horses here. Now of course I’m dealing with them regularly.

Made a mistake the other day; Lucie came home with a stock of them under her tail, I flushed them out and pulled them in bits. Shortly after, Lucie started kicking wildly; turned out I hadn’t beheaded the gruesome things efficiently and bits of them were still alive & crawling out of the dust and up Lucie’s leg and she couldn’t shake them off because they could no longer fly and hung on to her coat!!!! Shades of the Terminator… So make sure you behead them efficiently or squash them totally on a hard surface or they’ll be back!

Thanks, littlewhitehorse, for completely creeping me out.  Speaking as someone who has hauled a semi-rotted dead mouse from Puppy Cinnamon’s stomach (by the tail that was still sticking out between her teeth), that’s not easy to do.

(Ok, Sara Louise, time to give this blog another mention on your lovely, romantic, expat-in-France blog... )