Great Western Employs 25 Dogs.

Lake County Mail, Issue 10, 30 July 1947, Page 11

Great Western Employs 25 Dogs.

Twenty-five sheep dogs are ou the pay-roll of the Great Western Railway in Wales. Sheep frequently break through, right-of-way fences, endangering their own lives and delaying trains, and the dogs, working without orders, find obscure openings in fences and hedges through which they herd the sheep back. They develop a remarkable “track sense,” and if caught between trains on adjacent tracks they lie down until both have passed. If men working on the track fail to heed the whistle of an approaching train the dogs bark at them and, refuse t° l^ ve until the workmen haye reached, a position of safety.

Some years ago, when malaria was prevalent in San Antonio, Texas, a doctor conceived the idea of employing armies of bats to rid the city of its mosquito-borne disease. The doctor established a bat refuge near one of the city’s worst marshes, and the mosquitoes were reduced in nurqber to a remarkable extent. The city authorities were so impressed that they made a law imposing fines on persons convicted of killing bats, and erected more bat houses. As a result, the city has long had a clean record so far as malaria is concerned.

Monkeys are on the pay-roll of the botanical department on the island of Singapore. They gather mangoes, coconuts, and, botanical specimens from high trees. They have been taught to understand about twenty words of the Malayan language, and the experiment has proved so successful that it is proposed ; to train mor«