It is always worth taking care around cattle for they are not as docile as they look. Only last week, I was seen off by an irate Hereford cow who really didn’t want me or Dora, my staffie dog, within a country mile of her precious calf. As she bellowed at us from the field gate, we didn’t argue back.

Out in the African savanna, from where all the world’s cattle came originally, roam vast herds of wild buffalo. Sadly now, most are corralled for their protection in national parks, depredated by poachers and psychopathic trophy hunters, but that’s another story. 

People should be wary of these mighty beasts: just like domestic cattle in our fields, they are exceptionally canny creatures, they watch and remember. Hunter turned conservationist Lindsay Hunt says touchingly of the Cape Buffalo, ‘they have exceptional memories. I have often been approached by buffalo that I have not seen for many years, which are tactile and demand affection.’ 

Female buffalos are social animals, bonded like close sisters, fiercely protective of each other and their young. Nor do they shrink from a fight: armed with formidable horns and neck hide several centimeters thick, they are magnificently fearless, and will drive off a pride of marauding lions with ease.

Satisfyingly perhaps, they can also exact a terrible revenge on their main foe: humankind. More people are killed in Africa, by buffalo than any other animal, barring human beings that is. They have great skill in seeking out hunters in particular, even stealthily setting out to ambush them. It is said that they can recognise and attack a person who had injured them, even years later. 

Be kind to buffalo, as with most creatures, and they will repay you with trust and respect. But do not expect to hurt or molest one and imagine that being stupid or brutish, you will ever be safe in its company.  As far as gun-toting macho men are concerned, buffalos never forget, nor do they forgive.

Nothing in this life is forever. 

Few species in earth’s history can surpass the dramatic tale of the dinosaurs: their majestic size, their carnivorous savagery, and most famously, their spectacular extinction 65 million years ago. 

From the slothful brontosaurus munching and wallowing in the swamplands, to the ferocious iron-jawed tyrannosaurus (an unfortunate creature said to have appalling halitosis), these lumbering behemoths ruled the planet for an eternity, a 100 million years or more, inhabiting land, sea and air.

Then something happened, and they disappeared, every single one of them; now just scattered bones and teeth, a few giant eggs buried in rock, are all that we know them by. 

Paleontologists disagree about their miserable end. Yes, there was an asteroid impact, perhaps several, which provoked first a nuclear winter and then a climatic greenhouse inferno. The fossil record also suggests another story: the age of the dinosaurs had been waning for millions of years before the coup de grâce. Their time, it seems, had come because other orders of life, more supple and adaptable than they, had evolved in the earth’s gently cooling climate and all the specialist food chains upon which the old order had depended were being choked off.

What did for the dinosaurs its seems was less a single cataclysmic incident, than a slowly unfolding evolutionary process. They had became supernumerary, ill-equipped, and incompetent in the face of contending forces and changing conditions. If only they could have downsized and changed their diets, have learned to adapt. Alas they were not as clever as the mammals, snapping at their evolutionary heels.

Their memory lingers in the popular imagination: the world’s most powerful creatures turned to dust, nothing much more these days than plastic playthings, an ignominious fall from glory.

Thus it is that the mighty and powerful, blinded by their magnificence, can rarely foresee their impending downfall. 

Note: these silly musings were suggested by reports of the Councillors Noel and Jayne Roberts playfully sporting plastic dinosaur toys at the Ledbury Town Council meeting on 22 July 2015. Ha, ha. What a delightful sense of humour they have.    

Are toads the most misunderstood and maligned of creatures? 

Between frogs and toads, there is a fine taxonomic division. Amphibians both, they breed in water and can breathe through their damp skin, creatures of a demi-monde between land and pond. But frogs are smooth while toads are rough textured. Frogspawn is laid in untidy clumps and mounds whereas the toad’s spawn is strung out in elegant chains, like ghostly pearl necklaces. 

Across roads and car-parks, phalanxes of brave, strong toads march resolutely to their watery breeding places, undaunted by hazard.  No heroic migration attends the unruly frog, which lurks year round in the murky depths. Emerging from the mud when the weather seems clement, they set to their violent copulations in great frenzies of aqautic sex, three or four males clamped to a single hapless female. 

The toad seems an altogether more evolved, resourceful little beast, happy and thriving on land or in water. It can also deliver a toxic kick to any creature foolish enough to attack: those little textured bumps on its back are full of venom, sufficient to stop any predator in its tracks. Never squeeze a toad therefore. 

With beautiful eyes the colour of amber and a calm, docile temperament, it is strange and somehow tragic that gentle Bufo Bufo is forever linked with evil and moral ugliness in the popular imagination, a by-word for deceit and low cunning. 

Feel sorrow and pity for the lying toad.